Good (Meh) Morning

As a (former) resident of a big city like Chicago, I’m supposed to be cold, unfriendly and aloof. And I am. But it’s not Chicago’s fault. I would have been that way had I grown up in Smackover, Arkansas (population 1,881), Willacoochee, Georgia (population 1,434) or Kaliforsky, Alaska (population 6,250) or any of the thousands of other cities that constitute Small Town America, where the values of friendliness, truth, honesty and racis…I mean, hard work reside. But because I spent my formative years surrounded by a couple million other people in a metropolis hiding under the butt end of a lake, my requests for people to kindly get the fuck out of my way is somehow misconstrued as generic big city rudeness. Nothing could be further from the truth. Now kindly get the fuck out of my way.

That’s not to say that big city folk like Chicagoans are open, overly friendly, embracing and will hand you a puppy the minute you step off the Greyhound bus with your cardboard suitcase. We CAN be nice, we just don’t trip over ourselves doing it. You need directions to the Field Museum, Sears Tower, Art Institute or Garfield Park Conservatory, we’ll take time out of our busy day to point you in the right direction. But if you’re expecting a Chicagoan to simply read the distress on your face as you stand on the corner of State and Madison clutching an indecipherable street map, or sense your confusion, take you by the hand and lead you through the maze of underground Red and Blue Line subway tunnels, fugeddaboudit. You gotta ASK for help from a Chicagoan. For various reasons (decorum, personal space, the fear of getting a shiv in the gut), we don’t step in and volunteer information to complete strangers unless they ask for help. Hell, you’ll get two or three Chicagoans stopping to help you if you ask and they’ll debate the best route to your destination, leaving you to walk away feeling better about the city, despite the gunshots you hear afterwards as the “debate” between the Good Samaritans devolves into a fatal argument.

I’ve heard tourists marvel at how nice Chicagoans were in comparison to their expectations, once they got over their fear of being stuffed in a trunk if they asked someone how to get to American Girl Place. Nope, we Chicagoans have no qualms about helping out a stranger in need on the street, mostly because we want you to find where you have to go and get the fuck out of our way.

So, like I said, we can be nice, we just don’t go out of our way to do it. Which means no saying “Good morning!” to complete strangers on the street just because our paths happen to cross, no “after you…no, after you” dance when it comes to getting on a subway car, no pitching in to help you with that big sofa that you’re struggling to bring into your apartment by yourself unless there’s a sawbuck involved. That rushing around you see us doing as you’re standing in front of the Disney Store blocking sidewalk traffic is us getting to where we have to go, doing stuff and generally going about our day without unnecessary chit-chat. If we give you a “what up?” head nod as we pass you on the street, consider yourself blessed.

Which brings me to my second day in Denver, a Wednesday morning when the sun was shining and despite the remnants of snow on the ground and it was warm enough for a person to walk around with their jacket unzipped and not have the wind sick a cold hand down their chest. Warm enough for a person to work outdoors, which explained the whining of the power drill I heard as I walked back and forth from the car to the apartment taking items from one into the other. On a trip back into the apartment, carrying my dirt-covered spare tire bike rack, I followed the sound upward and saw a guy drilling on a wooden post on the balcony of a second floor apartment. I wasn’t sure what he was doing, whether he was removing something, replacing something or installing something, but if you had to do outdoor work on a February morning, this would be the one, which I suspected he already knew.

On my last trip out of the apartment, carrying my gym bag and headed to my car to drive to Bally’s, I heard the drill still whining away, but this time accompanied by a woman’s voice. I couldn’t make out what she was saying but I assumed she was talking to the guy with the drill since the two sounds were coming from the same direction. I walked through the courtyard and toward the front gate when the voice suddenly got louder and seemed to now be aimed in my direction.

“Morning!”

I hesitated to turn around and look up because for all I know, that shout could be directed to someone else. It’s happened before, me thinking that I’m the recipient of a vocal greeting, a wave or a car horn honk, realizing I don’t know the person who appears to be signaling me and figuring out the real object of their attention-getting maneuvers is standing behind me or next to me, and I’m forced to figure out a way to exit from this situation gracefully, to pretend that I wasn’t really waving back, just wiggling my wrist because it was sore from writing, see, or that I was actually waving at someone behind THEM, so there.

“Morning!! MORNING!!!”

The voice was more forceful this time. Ok, she apparently wasn’t going to give up, so I gave a quick look around to see if there was anyone else in my proximity. There wasn’t. And I didn’t hear the drill guy stop or acknowledge her so I concluded that she wasn’t talking to him. So at the risk of looking like an idiot, I figured I had to respond. After all, I was new here and I didn’t want to immediately become known as the anti-social asshole in the building. That was my title back in Chicago anyway.

I looked up, saw the drill guy and next to him, through the bushes that partially blocked the view, I saw a woman in a robe leaning slightly over the balcony and looking in my direction. Although her hair was mostly black, her face made her look older than her black hair would suggest she was. Since I am lousy at guessing ages, I put her somewhere between 40 and 69.

“Good morning!” She yelled it again.

I’m not used to this, this random wish for a pleasant start to beginning of the day from a complete stranger. Hell, my own family didn’t greet each other like this in the A.M., our morning pleasantries going something like: “Hey, don’t eat all the Froot Loops. … Shut up, I wasn’t about to. …You did, you ate ‘em all, you pig. …Well, you should have got up earlier. …Ma!” Ah, good times…

But here was a complete stranger yelling “morning” at me, a wary, not-at-all-outgoing, technically-still-a-Chicagoan. And the tone with which she said it threw me off as well, employing the kind of urgency one usually reserves for drawing attention to falling boulders which are about to crush their hiking companions or alerting their paramours of the arrival of husband pulling up in the driveway. She was either really excited that it was morning or had a real desire to be heard over the sound of the drill. I’m not sure which.

This wasn’t the first time I’d encountered unexpected salutations from random citizens here in Denver. On earlier visits, Kim and I would jog in the nearby park (the one with little dollops of goose shit every three inches and signs warning of coyotes patrolling the area at night) and as we passed by people walking or running in the opposite direction, they’d greet us with “Good morning.” This disturbed me. For one, it required me to talk while running, and since I was not exactly marathon material and was still getting acclimated to the new altitude in the Mile High City, it was going to have to be one or the other. Second, I wasn’t sure if everybody did this. Was I now required to initiate the greeting process as well? If so, how often? Should I wait to see if they speak first and then return the greeting, or was that being standoffish and rude? Was this a practice reserved for grown-ups or did I have to say “good morning” to kids too? What about homeless guys? What if they’re wearing headphones (the joggers, not the homeless guys)? What if I’M wearing headphones? You can see how quickly this can spiral out of control and why I wish people would just shut up and run.

Not that everyone in Denver was super-cheerful. There were more than enough people who walked down the street tight-lipped and silent and I figured they were new in town like me, landing here from cities where doors were locked tight at night, where streets with one or more lights out were avoided and where Ratso Rizzo informed aggressive drivers that, hey, I’m walkin’ here! But there were still a substantial number of people who felt compelled to greet me even thought we hadn’t been formally introduced. From the hipster guy walking past me in front off the coffee shop to the Mexican woman hanging out with her drinking buddies on a bus stop bench (Ok, she did yell “Hey, Bill!” at me, but I’m still going to count that one.)

This was never a problem in Chicago where the vast majority of people say nothing to each other and that works out just fine. Not because we were rude or hate each other but because it was just more socially expedient that way. We wished each other a good morning by not interfering with each other’s morning to say it. That phrase, “The less said, the better” was tailor-made for Chicago. Unless I say otherwise, have a great fucking day, ok pal?

Balcony-yelling lady wasn’t giving up. She leaned over the railing like a guy trying to haul in a 75-pound striped marlin, staring right at me and waiting to reel in my response. I thought for a second about ignoring her to prove a point and teach her a valuable lesson: don’t expect everybody to be as happy to see the new day as you, oh woman of indeterminate age. But I caved under the tremendous pressure of social conventions. I thought about the consequences of ignoring her, the comments about me that would seep through the building like smoke, the awkward encounters in the laundry room. I looked up and her and offered a feeble, half-mumbled “morning.” Not a “GOOD morning”, mind you, just “morning”, as minimalist a greeting as I could offer. I do have my standards. You’ll take your goddamn one-word “morning” and like it.

I was forced to admit defeat, a loss in the battle to stay just as I was when I left Chicago. But the war is not over. I’ll have Denverites ignoring each other in the morning in no time.

It’s time to go jogging.

Go West, Not-So-Young Man

It's my second full day of living in Denver. I want to try and write about my first year here. I want to write something every day about what's already shaping up as culture shock after living 40+ years in Chicago. I probably won't be able to pull that off, but anyway... so it goes.


When the car refused to start just after we’d stopped for a moment to take a photo in front of the “Welcome To Colorful Colorado” sign, I debated whether it was an unusual coincidence or a foreboding tragedy.

I decided to compromise and call it an unusual tragedy.

A little more than 200 miles outside of Denver, the sun battling the cold weather for dominance, we stopped the Jeep on the side of a road leading to a camping site for a photo of me standing in proximity to a large wooden sign that read “Welcome To Colorful Colorado” painted in big white letters. The sign was set back from the road up a slight dirt incline that was dotted with dead grass. Kim, who was sitting in the car, motioned for me to get closer to the sign so that she could take a photo of me with her digital camera. I declined to move closer, joking that there might be snakes hiding somewhere around here. OK, I was half joking. Yes, it was about 30 degrees outside, the sun was beginning to set and the chance of a rattler who didn’t mind the cold weather slowly inching toward me to sink its poisonous fangs into my ankle were probably remote. But I’m from Chicago and after ghost voters, Loop floods and the “mysterious” destruction of small airports in the middle of the night, I take nothing for granted. I kept close to the car, gave a couple of glances at the ground around me and waited for the shutter to click.

Back to the car, get in the driver’s seat, seatbelt fastened, put the key in the ignition, turn and…nothing. Panic didn’t immediately set in, surprisingly. Here I was in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by a gas station, a seedy motel and an abandoned diner just behind us, a whole lot of empty Colorado in front of us and a sign mocking my arrival. So far out of my comfort zone I might as well have renamed the Jeep Wrangler the Santa Maria. But I was keeping my cool. At least for a second. I tried the key again and heard no engine revving sounds and told myself, OK, you can panic a little now.

Kim was the first to notice that although the shifter was in park, the display on the dashboard said the car was in reverse. More confusion. A genuine “What the fuck?” moment, made even more dread-inducing by the fact that my knowledge of the mechanics of a car is only slightly less than my knowledge of the Keynesian School of economics and its relationship the Rational Expectations Theory, which is to say jack shit. But I employed whatever facts about automobiles I had picked up throughout my life and ran through them in a search for possible solutions. Was the battery dead? Was there enough air in the tires? Did we have enough gas? Were the ashtrays clean? Quick, check the rear cup holders.

Needless to say, none of these possible solutions solved the problem so I decided to rely on the twin brothers of prayer and magic. Kim joined me in staring at the dashboard; she, being the logical person she is, was no doubt looking for a possible cause. I, on the other hand, was attempting mental telepathy, hoping to psychologically bond with the engine to get it to see things my way and miraculously start, to convince it to maybe speak with the transmission, since they were so close and all, to get it to cooperate and magically fall back into place. I turned the key once more and the engine told me to go fuck myself.

I mentally went through our entire trip to that point, partially trying to determine if the problem was something that had happened earlier and partially amazed at all we had gotten through to get to where we were now, sitting in a stalled vehicle 200 miles outside of Denver in the middle of nowhere with a “Welcome To Colorful Colorado” sign laughing at us.

The slightly hurried departure from my Chicago apartment where I ended up leaving behind my practically new platform bed (value: about $200), a slightly used leather couch and about an eighth of a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label. The long drive through Illinois, leaving everything I knew behind me. Driving through Iowa, not as flat as you might imagine. Driving through Nebraska, much flatter than you would imagine. Waking up to a snowstorm on Valentine’s Day in Lincoln and attempting to continue the journey; having to employ my defensive driving skills when we started skidding on black ice; being forced off the highway when state troopers closed I-80 because of apocalyptic weather conditions; holing up for a while in Shoemakers Truck Stop and Gasoline Station Museum before heading into downtown Lincoln and a Holiday Inn; monitoring weather and highway reports all morning and deciding to give it another day before trying to hit the road; waking in the morning to a blast of cold wind and setting out for I-80; passing abandoned cars and the remnants of cars; gripping the steering wheel like the bridle of a runaway horse for about 250 miles as the wind occasionally tried to push the Jeep into a Nebraska ditch; lunch at something called Carlos O’Kelly’s (no corned beef and guacamole on the menu, unfortunately…or fortunately); making the detour onto US 76 and stopping to gas up one last time in Julesburg, Colorado and then pausing to get a picture of me standing in front of that goddamned “Welcome To Colorful Colorado” sign…

As we sat there, surrounded by two-dimensional metal cutouts of buffalos and teepees, installed to add to a more Wild West atmosphere of the campgrounds I guess, I pondered our next move. I looked in the side view mirror and saw behind us the seedy motel, the perfect place to kill an unsuspecting traveler and leave the body to the pumas. The gas station we had just left didn’t appear to have a repair garage so fixing the car would obviously require at least one phone call and might call for an overnight stay considering the time. So if we took turns staying awake in shifts, we could probably spend the night at the Bates Motel and get the Jeep repaired in the morning. As for weapons, I had The Club in the car and my …

It was then that Kim volunteered to walk back to the gas station and call for a mechanic. I felt guilty that I hadn’t thought of that and even guiltier that I probably wasn’t about to suggest that, no, I should go. Hey, she’s the one that grew up on a farm; she was more used to being surrounded by wide-open spaces than I was. Wide-open spaces seemed more of a danger to me than the congestion of the city. In a city you could hide behind things, duck into stores to escape danger, etc. In wide-open spaces, there was nothing to do but run and hope you were faster than whatever was chasing you. Besides, someone has to protect the car and all my belongings from coyotes or wolverines or chupacabra or whatever the fuck was out there. That was the excuse I was going to tell myself every time the story of this incident came up. I watched her walk back down the road toward the gas station, probably with a little more confidence in this situation that I had. Ok, a lot more.

I sat there in the car and, other than the sound of the occasional truck or auto passing by the highway just in front of me, heard nothing. No car horns honking at drivers who were slow to react to the green light, no buses rumbling to a stop at the corner, no voices in the alley yelling for TJ to come down and open the door because they didn’t have a key, no police sirens signaling the end to yet another urban dispute. Just the wind rustling through dried grass and an empty western sky stretching out behind me. If a longhorn walked by at that moment I probably wouldn’t have been surprised.

It was then that it hit me: I was in The West, the one I had read about in books and had seen in old movies and the occasional cigarette ad. OK, no, this wasn’t THE WEST, with horses kicking up dust as they delivered shipments of sorghum, molasses and them fancy toilet waters from Back East, and clapboard towns where the barber also treated your pyrosis. But it was “west”, more west than I had been in before. I’d been to Tucson and El Paso before, but visiting Tucson and El Paso is not the same as actually living there, I figured. This was (personally) uncharted territory, more foreign to me than Peotone or Sturtevant, Wisconsin. I felt like a pioneer. A pioneer with an iPhone that currently had a limited signal, but a pioneer nonetheless.

A truck pulled up behind me and Kim got out accompanied by a mechanic who looked like, well, a mechanic. Dark blue work pants and jacket, both slightly stained with grease from repairing a ’53 Chevy Camero with a 5.3 hemi engine and an overhead cam shaft (OK, no, I don’t know if any of that is possible). Slightly overweight with a mechanic’s moustache. Yeah, you could look at him and tell that he would know what was wrong.

I explained the situation to him as best as I could, and to make it appear I wasn’t a complete idiot, I threw in some automotive terms like “key” and “turn” and “won’t start”. He looked at the car for a moment (was he using mental telepathy?), sat in the driver’s seat, fiddled with a few things inside, then got out and slid under the car. I was going to make some snide comment to Kim about how we were lucky that the Jeep had such a high ground clearance when the slightly overweight mechanic popped back out from under the car and issued his diagnosis.

“Yeah, your transmission linkage is missing,” he explained.

“Ah, the linkage,” I said knowingly. He wasn’t buying it.

“Yeah, the thing that connects the shifter to the transmission…It musta fell off or something. Strangest thing. It’s not broken or anything, it’s just not there. I’ve seen it on Fords before. First time I’ve seen it on a Jeep.”

Of course. The first time. Now. My car. In front of the “Welcome To Colorful Colorado” sign.

You could change the gear manually, he explained, but to do that you’d have to be under the car. And to even get the car started, you have to get underneath, flip a lever to park, start the car, and then flip it to drive. It was a procedure in which even I could see the danger. Our slightly overweight mechanic suddenly became super daredevil mechanic. He slid back underneath the car and instructed me to keep my foot on the brake, lest I start the car and immediately crush his ample midsection.

“You got your foot on the break?” came a muffled voice from underneath the car.

“Yeah,” I answered.

“You sure?”

“Yup, I’m sure.”

He yelled at Kim, “Does he have his foot on the brake?” Apparently he either didn’t trust me or had little confidence I knew what a brake pedal looked like.

I shifted my legs so that she could see my foot on the brake. “Yup, his foot’s on the brake.”

“OK, start the car.” I turned the key and the engine sprang to life. Daredevil mechanic guy slid out from underneath the car, wiped his hands on his pants and began to explain the situation. “Ok, because the linkage is missing, you can’t shift it into reverse, unless you get under the car again. Turn it off and let me show you.” I shut the car down, got out and slid under the car with daredevil mechanic guy.

“See this lever here?” he asked, pointing to…something.

“Yeah,” I lied. The entire area was a confusing canvas of imposing metal with just a hint of rust.

“OK, this position is park,” he said, flicking some lever with his finger, “this is neutral, this is reverse and this is drive.”

This began to sound important. I imagined a scenario where we’d have to go in reverse for some reason and I wouldn’t be able to do so and there we’d be, face to face with a mountain lion and unable to back away. “Show me that again,” I said, this time trying to pay attention.

Thirty-five dollars later, we were back on the road and headed further into the West, driving through an undulating landscape and past clusters of cows (wait…herds, right?) that stood around and chewed weeds nonchalantly and looked at me as if to say, “Are you sure you should be here?”

I ignored them. What did they know, they were just cows. We kept driving, determined not to go into reverse, staring into the setting sun and squinting my way into Denver.