It was a very good year

When I was 27, it was a very good year. It was a very good year for Southern girls to cast caution to the wind, move to Chicago with a Midwestern boy, live in a basement apartment in Rogers Park, walk to the Howard Street EL, get Squeak the cat, teach and study yoga on Bryn Mawr Ave., get befriended by Durga, clean houses for a living, make salads and friends at the Heartland Cafe, run at the Loyola track, run the Chicago Marathon, get married.

It was a very good year for Midwestern boys to ride the EL up to Pioneer Press and paste up ads for suburban weeklies, ride the Evanston Express down to the Loop to type and make copies for Ma Bell, walk to the lakefront for lunch, wander the Art Institute on Free Thursday, go to the public library on Michigan Avenue, watch movies with Edward Mellish, run into Corky Siegel at the beach, eat Mexican at La Choza, get accepted at Oberlin, get married.

It was a very good year to go to t'ai chi classes on Dempster Street every Saturday, learn Basic Movement, study the Ch'en form, drink Professor Huo's jasmine tea, hang out after class, get befriended by DJ and Dick, read their books, listen to their nutritional advice, pester them with questions, witness Professor's painting demonstration, decide to go back to school in physical education, receive a painting as a wedding gift.

As of this month it's been 27 years since those life-altering days enduring a Chicago winter and enjoying a Chicago summer. I still do Basic Movement but stopped practicing and forgot the Ch'en form after four years. I learned a Yang form, then another one, then another one, and I still practice it (the second one). I took up ch'i-kung and do that every day now. I still repeat the starting instructions from January 1978 on occasion, and it still makes a difference:

Assume the head to be suspended from above, face the front, mouth closed, tongue touching the roof, breathe naturally through the nose, let the shoulders and elbows sink down with arms, hands, and fingers naturally extended at your sides, relax the body, clear the mind, breathe deeply, inhale, exhale.

A few things have changed since those days. Now there are two young adults, out in the world on their own adventures, whose DNA derives directly from mine and Gven Golly's. If I were a total Romantic, I would say that the story of the second 27 was written in that one Chicago year when Gven and Sven crystallized as a couple in the heat and cold of the Windy City. But it's more complicated than that, so I'll just spill my pent-up nostalgia and appreciation in this space and get back to work on the next cycle of nine times three.