Then, there are the sunbathers. They bask in the harmful ultraviolet rays of the battering sun and shun the protective sheath of the water. As a Lake Michigan local, I don't have to deal with the disgusting layer of salt that invades your pores when the dust, or, in this case, salt, settles. Freshwater is really the way to go, but I digress.
Each morning that I was in the hospital, the sun would hit me in the face until about ten, when it would be out of my line of sight. Then, I could finally appreciate the comfort and beauty it would both foster and, obviously, illuminate. Sunshine is like a draped blanket. It may miss certain corners and crevices, but ultimately it covers everything that wants to be spotlighted. For the most part, if you want what it has to give, it's there.
Ever since I was discharged, I have come to understand a new brand of the beauty given by sunlight. Ralph and my mother recently bought a house in the country, with picturesque, pastoral views visible from both the front and back windows. From the back porch, I sit on a swing and stare at the scorched-match rows of soybeans that begin just where the backyard ends. I've never seen anything quite like it. It looks like the backyard lies at the rim of a million paintbrushes whose tips have been seared.
This is not to say that I was immune to the nearly overwhelming brilliance of the sun in my hospital room. The way in which the buildings seemed to bend toward the sun's rays was breathtaking. At dusk, the mirrored top of the Prudential Building looked positively transcendent, as it reflected, harshly at times, the waning but still-vibrant sunlight.
To prove that I am, at bottom, a city boy, I loved to gaze upon the skyline at night and tried to think of an adequate metaphor to describe it. Eventually, I had it--sort of. I couldn't think of the name of the toy that I was thinking of, but luckily my friend Colleen--who I hadn't seen since college but who was incidentally visiting her sister, a patient for a different procedure at the same hospital--named it. The Chicago skyline, at night, was a massive Lite Brite screen.
Lite Brite, for those who don't know, is a black screen that gets lighted by small plastic pegs that glow upon insertion. After a few minutes, though, these individual torches recede into the larger picture that the child--it's a children's toy--is trying to depict. The same phenomenon happens with the Chicago skyline. At first, you can pick out individual windows, or pegs, but eventually this becomes impossible because they melt together until a building looks like a giant-sized fiber-optic battery. (Is that right? Remember--I was an English major, and know nothing about electrical engineering.)
Pretry as that is, it's an illusion. The buildings could look ghastly in daylight. Like Detroit (I couldn't resist). Fortunately, though, Chicago has the most beautiful skyline in the country (sorry, NYC, but it's true), so the sun merely has to shine and the beauty emerges.
This it does. Even on cloudy days (see below), the sun will shoulder its way through the clouds and flash the skyline. Like a camera, and not like a sunbathing co-ed on Spring Break.
So, even though I marvel at the fields around this house, I know that another, more resplendent, menagerie lurks a mere 30 miles away in Chicago.
R
