The other day I was walking through the Loop and had a good memory from a few years ago.  It was the last winter that my dad was still living in his house, and I was coming home from visiting him.  As the Metra train got close to downtown, I got into a conversation with a guy near me. 

Sid was blind and hadn't been in the city long. He'd moved up from Memphis and was just learning out to get around in Chicago.  When our UP-North train arrived at Ogilvie station, he needed to know how to get across downtown to LaSalle St. station to take the Rock Island to visit his girlfriend.

I was making the same connection, so I offered to escort him there.  I gave some thought to the audio and tactile landmarks along the way.  Each of the bridges across the Chicago River has a slightly different audio and tactile landscape.  I took him across Madison past the opera house, a distinctive building landmark, with a finely textured stone facade unlike the glass and steel boxes near it on Wacker Drive.

The Loop elevated train structure is a great audio landmark, in combination with other audio and tactile cues.  We walked along Wells St.  He told me a bit about his experiences in Chicago so far.  When we got to Quincy, I put his hand on one of the distinctive steel bollards that rim the block around the Federal Reserve.  If you're under the El and touching one of these bollards, you know *exactly* where you are, because there are no others like them in the city.  I described the echoes and smoke that would identify the passage under the middle of the Board of Trade nearby.

We reached LaSalle St. station just in time to board the next Rock Island train to Joliet.  As we continued chatting on the train, I thought of my dad. I learned so much from Dad about navigating the city, with history lessons along the way.

Dad's been gone for three and a half years now.  I miss him, but I'm glad that he's no longer suffering the ravages of Parkinson's disease that made his last few years so difficult.

One of the lessons he taught was kindness.   If he'd been in my shoes, I could picture him helping Sid as I did.  It's a good way to remember Dad.