An Early Childhood in Chicago Area Winters-- Joking about the Weather and Bundling Up

I guess Minneapolis is actually colder in the winter than Chicago, but the City by the Lake is a huge metropolitan area that has as noted often, summers like Florida ones and winters like Canadian ones..

 A Chicago area friend recently sent me this " Temperature Conversion Guide" which gives you an idea of how the natives joke their way through the sometimes brutally cold and snowy winters

Temperature Conversion Guide

50°F (10°C)- New Yorkers turn on the heat. Chicagoans plant gardens.

40°F (4°C)- Californians shiver uncontrollably. Chicagoans sunbathe.

35°F (2°C)- Italian cars won't start. Chicagoans drive with the windows down.

32°F (0°C)- Distilled water freezes. Chicagoans water gets thicker.

20°F (-7°C)- Floridians wear coats, gloves & wool hats. Chicagoans throw on a T-shirt.

15°F (-9°C)- Californians begin to evacuate the state. Chicagoans go swimming.

0°F (-18°C)- New York landlords finally turn up the heat. Chicagoans have the last cookout before it gets cold.

-10°F (-23°C)- People in Miami cease to exist. Chicagoans lick flagpoles.

-20°F (-29°C)- Californians fly away to Mexico. Chicagoans throw on a lightweight jacket.

-40°F (-40°C)- Hollywood disintegrates. Chicagoans rent videos.

-60°F (-51°C)- Mt. St. Helen's freezes. Chicago Girl Scouts begin selling cookies door to door.

-80°F (-62°C)- Polar bears begin to evacuate the Arctic. Chicago Boy Scouts postpone "Winter Survival" classes until it gets cold enough.

-100°F (-73°C)- Santa Claus abandons the North Pole. Chicagoans pull down their earflaps.

-173°F (-114°C)- Ethyl alcohol freezes. Chicagoans get frustrated when they can't thaw their kegs.

-297°F (-183°C)- Microbial life survives on dairy products. Illinois cows complain of farmers with cold hands.

-460°F (-273°C)- ALL atomic motion stops. Chicagoans start saying "Cold 'nuff for ya?"

-500°F (-296°C)- Hell freezes over. The Chicago Cubs win the World Series.

As someone who attended Cubs games at Wrigley Field when a kid, I remember the schoolmate who wrote a wry paper for school on the " Strange Existential Faith of Cubs Fans" in high school ..

I write my first poem (which I won't print here) in kindergarten in Chicago which bemoaned " all these moats of melting snow and ice" you encountered when trying to cross the street, which I somehow rhymed with " it is not always nice."

When I was six we moved to the northern edge of the town of Skokie, just a strange village then with "streets to nowhere" and empty blocks with sidewalks and street signs and no houses all around ( they had started to develop it right before the crash of 1929 and put in all these sewers, water mains and wide concrete streets...all part of a plan by the magnate Marshall Field to build a town with tons of three story Chicago style apartment buildings and a planned population of 300,000. Then the rug was pulled out from under the whole scheme and by the time I lived there it was a patchwork of some of apartment houses but mostly one family houses on small lots with plenty of empty lots and blocks as I noted, and sidewalks leading off into cornfields on the Northern edge near where I lived, and also all these tall elm trees which had been growing since planted in the late 1920's..

My neighborhood was an overwhelmingly Christian, all white one (almost-- there was one boy with an American father and a Japanese mother in my class at school and also a Hispanic boy ( half Jewish) whose family practiced Ethical Culture, which he could not explain...

Over near where the Edens expressway had sliced through the subdivided area where we lived, the firemen would flood this one cul de sac wide concrete street in the winter where the kids could skate and play pick up games of ice hockey. There was a much bigger skating rink in the main park in the center of the Village ( for some reason, the locals always insisted on keeping the place a "village" rather than a town).

I had one near death experience (kind of) when I fell into a sinkhole of icy water at the age of seven way out on the edge on the playground at the semi-rural feeling Sharp Corners school..

Two older girls pulled me out and told me how stupid I was to have jumped into the water ( JUMPED?) and that I had to go to the principal's office, with implied punishment in all of this..

The principal, a quiet older man, just sent for my mother for dry clothes for me...she arrived in a remarkably bad humor ( I wonder what had happened THAT day) and scolded me for being so dumb as to get myself into this mess. As I changed my clothes in this little common area, I complained to her that some older boys there were pointing at me and laughing, to which she replied, "of course they are, you did something stupid again."

I have to note here that I had already been noticed by my teachers as a "bright" kid and my parents always held me to a higher standard of behavior than they did my older brother, say, who was more or less EXPECTED to do dumb childish things.

But my teachers were so pleased with me that the boredom of going to school was offset by the fact that I could read and write and do arithmetic so much better than all the other kids my age.
It did not seem to be bringing me any real advantage that I could see, but I was still flattered by the attention of one teacher especially, who made me feel very special..

Like most bright kids I would eventually meet other who were even more "gifted" than I was , especially when I got to high school.
But I have drifted somewhat away from those "Chicagoland" winters, where we played outdoors when it was near zero degrees Fahrenheit in the winter and enjoyed snowball fights and hot cocoa all winter long under the endless grey skies..

To say nothing of the wonderful winter visits to downtown Chicago to see all the department store displays and to go to events like the first Cinerama movies..

 We never lacked heat in the winter, I was not to experience that until I lived in New York City and encountered all these buildings with funky boilers that were always failing...

Now that I have arthritis especially, I would not want to be in that climate where my second cousin and his wife spend their weekends often up near Green Bay, Wisconsin, one of the most unlikeliest places for a major pro football league team, but part of the bundle of contradictions that are the American Middle West.