Bug

One day in Chicago I was walking back from the lake, west on East 57th Street, under the IC tracks toward the University. It was August. A few days earlier there had been a terrible dust storm: orange thick dust filled the air in the heat, and coated every surface. If you left your windows open at home, everything inside was covered with fine brown silt. But that was a few days earlier. Now, the air was hot and dry and the wind was blowing from the east, toward the prairie. As I walked past Powell’s a bug flew into my left eye. I felt it and my reflexive response was to put my left index finger into my eye to flick it out. This entailed taking off my sunglasses. I could not see, because my right eye, the one without a bug in it, does not see much.

Putting my finger in my eye did more harm than good. It seems the bug, in its haste to escape my probing finger, crawled under my lower eyelid and into the warm space of the eye socket. The pain was excruciating. I did not know what to do. Cynthia, who was walking with me, hailed a passing taxi. We went straight on 57th Street to the emergency room of the University of Chicago Hospital. By now my eye was closed; I had to be led through the door, and I was in agony. I don’t remember how much time passed before I saw some a doctor. I don’t think it was very long. The doctor put drops in my eye to make it numb, and then extracted the bug. It was a large wicked-looking bug with mean wings. No wonder it hurt so much. I had to keep that eye covered, which meant I was functionally blind for a day or so.

I never liked living in Chicago very much, but I did sort of like the weather. The cruel howling winter was an adventure. The torpor of summer, and the wild storms that blew in over the lake, made every day unpredictable. Spring was so short it was utterly negligible, though. And autumn, normally my favorite time of year, was like some sort of cold monsoon season. My apartment was on the third floor of a run-down building not far from the lake. I had a porch out front, and in warm weather I would sit in a particular low-slung blue chair. From this angle I could not see the parking lot of the Hyde Park Food Co-op; I could see green treetops, and in my imagination, the lake that lay just out of sight beyond the trees (the third floor was not high enough for a lake view). I called it Barcelona, although I had never been to Barcelona. Because to me it felt like I was far away, sitting in that blue chair, gazing over the grey-green treetops that wavered in the hot sunlight. Barcelona, as seen from a seat on a balcony, in the heat of evening. The balcony was off the front room. In winter, the snow blew through the window-frames of that room, and formed drifts in the corners. And one summer, it was so hot, and I had no air-conditioning, so I would sleep in the bathtub filled with a few inches of cold water.