SHOPPERS & SAINTS

Every December I walk Chicago's Michigan Avenue. It calls itself The Magnificent Mile due to its glistening trees, decorated stores, and inextinguishable crowds of shoppers. Quirkally, all this modernity is anchored on one end by the subdued splendor of the old Drake Hotel, on the other by the gray classicism of the Tribune Tower.

But it's the images and music in between that's worth the walk.

Images like the wind-burned faces hidden inside swaths of colored scarves...pony-tails flapping behind giant woolen caps...leather boots clicking emphatically down the pavement...adult eyes fixed resolutely forward toward appointments or downward toward privacy...children eyes popping and flashing at everything they can see....traffic cops keeping it all flowing, some of them with military precision, others with patented flair.

Occasionally you even catch a glimpse of something that has to do with Christmas. An angel, a star, a crib. Of course, these are not what most shoppers are here for. Or even allow for. Isn't that unconstitutional or something...?

The music along the Magnificent Mile has in recent years become a mixed bagatelle. Yes, some sanitized Christmas songs having to do with reindeer and snowmen, but gotta watch the sacred stuff. Too many folks can be too offended by the sacred too close to the secular. Doesn't that have to do with Thomas Jefferson or something...?

A country's music can tell the story of its history. Yankee Doodle in the Revolutionary War...When Johnny Comes Marching Home in the Civil war...Over There in WWI...When the Lights Come On Again in WWII.
Of course, mixed in with the essential is the other. Which may come to some minds here as loud speakers occasionally pipe in "holiday music" by Lady Gaga, Eminem, or Jay-Z.

Near the end of the stroll appears this twentysomething lugging hardware that is clearly not a holiday gift. The hardware slips. I help. For a few moments we talk to one another through clouds of cold breath. She works for the nearby Rehabilitation Institute, and she's carrying a portable oxygen unit to her job. A job she loves, "because you really get to help and love people."

Waving goodbye, you have the feeling you just found the feeling you were looking for here. The feeling and the passion which started all this back in that shepherd's stable. As they say: All stories are true, some even happened!

And yet, I didn't even get her name...