Chicago Firsts

In 1967, fresh out of high school at seventeen, I boarded a northbound bus to the metropolis of the mid-west. After arriving in Chicago, while waiting to be picked up by a family member, I met my first con-artist who ripped me off for ten dollars. That's the way I was welcomed to Chicago. Chicago provided my first full-time job with a metal plating company. In 1969 I experienced my first airplane flight from Chicago to Memphis, Tn., and in the Spring of 1968, I witnessed a riot in Chicago. It was the most confusing, the darkest, and the longest night of my life. After turning twenty-one, I cast my first ballot in Chicago. Attended a Chicago City-College a year before enrolling in a four-year college from which I graduated in 1972. Fresh out of college at twenty-two, got married in Evanston, a Chicago suburb. In 1973, fourteen months after getting married, just shy of my twenty-fourth birthday, had my first child in southern Wisconsin, 100 miles north of Chicago. In 1974 at the age of twenty-four, I bought my first car in Zion, a Chicago suburb. Chicago was where I rented my first apartment and shortly thereafter, I experienced my first burglary at this apartment. Sometime later, while all alone on a dark city street, I was strong-armed robbed for the first and only time in Chicago. Where I grew up there were lots of alcoholics, but I met my first heroin addict in Chicago. I attended my first Major League Baseball game at Wrigley Field in Chicago. I did not realize until this week that there were so many firsts in Chicago, and I suspect if I kept at this there would be a lot more. May it suffice to end this journey with three more firsts in Chicago: First bike, first kiss, first accident(my fault)........ 051520PS