Things keep changing.

I don’t remember much about law school.  I think that I am not repressing those three years – but rather that not much good or interesting happened then.  My “existence period,” as Richard Ford called it, or something like it, in Independence Day.

I arrived in Chicago on an overnight train from Springfield, Massachusetts, because I could not afford a plane ticket.  I came with a big suitcase and a footlocker which held all the clothes I had and the small white alarm clock and desk lamp from my old room at home and the new radio/tape-player my parents had given me to celebrate my graduation from college.  And both my baseball gloves.  I brought, in short, everything I owned in the world, except for my bike and my books. 

I took a cab from the train station to the law school, which I was seeing for the first time, and checked in, whatever that involved.  And then I went looking for lunch.

I told myself that I was a sophisticated, mature graduate of maybe the best small college in the country, ready to take on whatever this Midwestern city, and its second-best law school, had to offer.  What I actually was was homesick, not for my parents’ home in Vermont, but for the home that college and my college friends had become.  And I felt poor, figuring and re-figuring the reserves in my modest checking account that would have to last until next summer against every out-of-pocket – the books for two semesters, each newspaper, each beer, each meal or snack that wasn’t on the dining card.  Including this first lunch, as the dining hall would not open until tomorrow. 

So I had walked west, away from the lake, a couple of blocks, until I saw an Italian restaurant advertising an all-you-could eat pasta and pizza buffet.  It cost more than I wanted to spend for lunch, but I thought I could eat a lot and then not eat much, or maybe at all, for dinner.  So I went in and ate bad pasta, bad pizza and bad salad, by myself, stuffing my face and feeling bad about all of it. 

Ten years later I had a chance to go back and wander around the law school neighborhood for the first time since I had graduated.  I looked for the Italian restaurant.  Not to eat there, but to stand outside and look at it and know that I wasn’t going back there – or how it felt there – any more.  But it was gone.

I went into Gino’s East first, the deep-dish pizza place, which had been a real treat during law school.   The black, graffiti-covered interior did not amuse, as it used to.  It looked stupid. 

The hostess asked me if I wanted to sit at the little bar, which was “not non-smoking, but nobody is smoking now,” she said. 

I said I preferred a table, please. 

A supervisor of some sort cruised by and told the hostess, as if I wasn’t standing right there, to offer me a table in the smoking section.  And so the hostess did, telling me again that no one was smoking now and showing me to an absurd little table with a single booth-style seat on one side and a small wooden chair on the other, in front of a curtain.  A man sat smoking at a table not five feet away. 

I told the hostess that I would go somewhere else for lunch.  And I left.

No big deal.  But something I would not have done until well into my thirties.  For way too long I would have sat in the pitiful chair, breathing the rancid smoke, and rationalizing the decision not to leave on some vague notion of not wanting to be discourteous to the waitress I did not know who worked for people who treated their customers like shit. 

And so I did not sit down at the sad little table in front of the stupid curtain in the smoking section where people in fact were smoking but instead walked a short distance to a place called the Red Rock Grill, where the host showed me to a big booth raised above the floor (which somehow makes the booth seem like a special place), over which hangs a terrific stuffed boar’s head, where I consume a local brew, half a barbecued chicken, coleslaw and spicy baked beans and it is fucking great.

The Red Rock Grill wasn’t there when I was in law school.  Things keep changing.  All the time.