LET’S just take a cab!” said Buzz as they walked out of Midway in Chicago into the arctic wind. There was an “L” (as in “elevated”) train that you could walk to, but it was a good block’s walk, covered, enclosed, to be sure, but nothing could keep out the arctic cold. And he was impatient. It was already noon. Friday. The big reunion began at seven-thirty that night and it would take an hour to get downtown, another hour to get out to Ellen’s in Grimore Park so that they could drive from far north all the way back to far south. Not that it made any sense, but if that’s what Ellen wanted to do, in all her smother-mother sense of protectiveness, OK. Who was he to resist the hard hand of benevolence from someone he’d known for almost sixty years?!?! Sixty years! Jesus … the sixty years seemed like they stretched back to the Paleolithic. Crunched down to the head of the line of taxis waiting outside. A very black driver in a very yellow cab. He turned around and smiled and they got in.
