Chicago,John Prine and Warm Bars

The street leading down to Joe’s place was iced over, to the point where traversing it was barely worth the effort, if not for the glowing warmth of the neon sign outside Joes place, well, I wouldn’t be here now.

Once Inside I could rub my hand across the smoky wood of the bar, and stare into the ancient mirror that seem to house as many lost souls and sacred demons as I did right now.

But that would be a few hours from now, where’d I be snug leaning against the bar, swaying to whatever tune would be on the jukebox: Something single, solitary and empowering, in a spiritual way that made me feel wonderfully happy to be sad and alone. It’s one of those single guy moments when you’re just glad to be alive, and someplace familiar.

But out on the street, walking across the ice was difficult. The ice came early this year, late October. The sky wore a jaundiced pallor, as the level of forbearance grew in each passing of subsequent panels of iced-over concrete like frosting on an unwanted birthday cake.

I thought about a lot on that trip to the bar. Firstly, the very fact that I was willing to traipse through all that ice and snow meant that I needed the comforting feeling of home that I wasn’t getting at home, currently a dilapidated hollow box of an apartment, slumming it on the eastern side of Chicago.

It was one of those moments where I wished I was in front of a piano, which always made more sense. My emotions could just run out on the ivories, launch out at all angles of the bar, reflected back at me from the stained cherry wood shelves that mounted the mirror, that drenched in the suffused smoke and warmth of the place.

The microphone felt squeamish the first time my lip accidentally grazed it, during that open mic night when I made the decision, right then and there that the piano and the succeeding series of bars that housed them, would be my traveling sense of home.

Throughout all the boroughs of Chicago, there wasn’t another place that gave me the same rush of emotions, even sitting at the bar alone, swaying to Tom Waits, Jeff Buckley, Leonard Cohen, John Prine, or whatever cracked soul leapt out of the fluorescent confines of the jukebox and wrapped my heart in adoration more than the whiskey that flowed through my blood.

But tonight on the way over to Joe’s, I found a locket, entombed in one inch of snow. A rosary encased in glass, with a fragrant picture of a woman I had once known. In the supermarkets, bars, back alleys or bookstore, at some point I had encountered her.

I may have even written a song about her. And as much as I tried to get it out of my mind, I couldn’t leave it behind without trying to free it from the icy confines of its captor.

I reached into my pocket, and placed my house key between the two knuckles of my right hand. I made numerous stabbing motions before I cracked it, freeing the locket from the ice with a swift kick of my boot heel.

I brushed off the snow and ice, and read the inscription on the back.

I had known her more than once, for a year when I first arrived. I had forgotten about her, until I caught the last letter of the engraving on the back.

Sam, with her curly brown hair, scrubbed the misery out of my brain like a healing brillo pad, taking out the cynicism, empowering my playing.

We didn’t last longer than two weeks, and since then I’d managed to completely forget about her.

I’m in the bar, staring into the locket, and crying salty tears into an empty glass, wondering where she is now, and if she's had any thoughts about me, and the song that lives somewhere between the remnants of our affair and the layers of ice on the east side of Chicago.