And I couldn’t stop laughing.

Down some water. Laugh. Dip among traffic. Laugh. Cram an energy bar and stop by the tampon boxes, fast food wrappers and museum-pimping statuary that pool along the spot the Roosevelt Road bridge overlooks both river and the vacant Rezkoville and I laugh laugh laugh.

July. Bike ride. Entire length of the city just for funsies and to end the site on a high note. I’ve been posting about it for a week and a half in stories I wrote between August and early October. You’re all caught up.

This is story #1,000. This site will end on Friday. I will miss it greatly. But I’m not ending, nor is Chicago.

I found crime here. I found death and sex and sin and kiddos playing piggy on summer days in the park. I wept and shook here and I laughed and shook here. I got drunk and kissed girls and took boat rides and played croquet. I wore spiked leather bracelets in one life and neckties in another. This town rattled and made me.

North through the skyscrapers, north through the trendy bars, north through gay neighborhoods and wealthy ones and ones where the poverty bleeds and bubbles from the soil itself. North.

The stories, by god the stories. The people I met! The people I didn’t meet! I’ve talked to dancers and magicians, politicians and thugs and drunks. I hit this city with all I had and at the end I told so, so few of its tales. This city threw itself at me and I gave it a pittance, my thousand stories trickle and tinkle against the ocean this Chicago throws back each moment.

In June 1921, Chicago Daily News reporter Ben Hecht debuted “1001 Afternoons in Chicago,” a daily column slicing life in the first quarter of the 20th century. In the preface to the book version, editor Henry Justin Smith recalled the “haggard but very happy” Hecht turning in the first few columns.

“It was clear that he had sat up nights with those stories. He thumbed them over as though he hated to let them go. They were the first fruits of his Big Idea — the idea that just under the edge of the news as commonly understood, the news often flatly and unimaginatively told, lay life; that in this urban life there dwelt the stuff of literature, not hidden in remote places, either, but walking the downtown streets, peering from the windows of sky scrapers, sunning itself in parks and boulevards. He was going to be its interpreter. His was to be the lens throwing city life into new colors, his the microscope revealing its contortions in life and death. It was no newspaper dream at all, in fact. It was an artist’s dream. And it had begun to come true. Here were the stories. … Hoped I’d like ‘em.”

By 1925, Hecht was sick of it. He had written a deliberately smutty novel called “Fantazius Mallare” as a test case on American obscenity law, and American obscenity law won.

He was fired from the Daily News in 1923 but had with a group of friends from the Dil Pickle Club arthouse scene started the Chicago Literary Times, an inspiring, brilliant drain on time and funding. Writer pals were calling about easy money and literary fortune in New York, and Hecht was ready to submit.

These are the final lines of the last 1001 Afternoons in Chicago story, “My Last Park Bench,” in which an older, weary Hecht stumbles across the younger version of himself.

“I catch a glimpse of him following me with his eyes, excited, damn him, over the mystery and romance which lurk in every corner of the city, even on a cinder-covered bench in Grant Park. Let him sit till doom’s day on this bench; he will never see me again. I have more important things to do than to collect cinders under my collar.”

I didn’t know when I started that Hecht was a liar and fabricator, a newsman conman of the era for whom Truth and Fact formed a Venn diagram, and none of it mattered so long as the words sang. He ended up in Hollywood, his gift for witty lies finding a more appropriate setting than a newspaper page.

I just knew I wanted to try what he claimed he was doing.

Since April 2012, I never missed a scheduled post day and, aside from some clearly satirical stories about mascots, Santa Claus and the brainstorming session for “tronc,” I never made up a word. What you read from me over these last six years is Chicago in the 20-tens as seen through my lens and microscope.

Hope you liked ‘em.

I was laughing when I hit the graveyard.

I made it. I made it through my self-assigned task. I made it through Chicago and I made it through, Chicago. My throat was dry and my legs burned white like charcoal ready for meat. But I was laughing.

My side trips and roundabouts added almost 20 miles to the route. Had I stuck to the path, I could have gotten there at 30. Instead the app tolds me I took 49.86 miles to get from Burnham to Evanston, plowing through that town between.

I’m not done yet. Not with my 1,001 stories, not with my half-century ride. Just a touch more to go.

I turned the bike around and headed back into the city, aiming my aching bones, burning legs and slightly chafed uppity bits toward the Howard Red Line stop. Nothing left in me, I slouched toward Bethlehem to be born.

A CTA worker came out of her glass cage to greet me.

“No bikes on the train,” she said.

And I laughed.

…

Read a few of my favorites:

The Rabbi’s Machine is Missing — Whatever happened to Chicago’s last typewriter repairman?

The Human Addict — A begging addict talks about being treated like a person.

Old Joe of Canaryville — Joe sits in his shop waiting for customers, as he’s done for 68 years.

Nuns in a Cash Register Store — Another bit of Chicago is lost.

The Nut Hut — Over soup, a woman recalls her role as a professional tease in a prostitution scam.

Party at Uncle Fun — Customers, staff and Uncle Fun himself say goodbye to the well-loved Belmont gag shop.

The Murderess Down the Block — I find out a 1920s lady gunner lived a few houses over from me.

The Most Sarcastic Child in Chicago Watches a Clown Show — Clowns from Theater Oobleck and El Circo Nacional de Puerto Rico win over a very sarcastic child.

The Steelworker’s Mermaid — How four sculptors hid a seven-foot mermaid for 14 years.

Mama Olaf — An immigrant tale of love and tripe soup.

Miss Sweetfeet Breaks — A breakdancer talks about the need for more B-Girls.

Light and the Rocket — A child I knew just killed a man.

The 16th Artist — One man’s arts center aims to revive Englewood.

The Rabbi, Harry Potter and Too Many Corpses — A rabbi has to tell a little boy some bad news.

Whatever Happened to the High Priestess of the Flappers? — In 2016, I wrote about the head of a 1920s clique of teen glamour girls. In 2018, her granddaughter reached out.

See their greying temples, the early cobwebs of laugh lines around their eyes not yet spidered across their faces. Hear their small groans and grunts as they scale the hill overlooking lake on one side, bike path on the other.

Visualize them standing in silence for a moment at a lonely spot on the grassy outlook. Then they plop to the ground and hoist out the beers.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Ben Hecht lately. He’s the man who in the 1920s concocted the idea I stole for this site. He was a liar and an egotist, half if not all of his 1,001 stories (425 actually, but there’s a story behind that) he completely made up and he truly believed people were both impossibly stupid and impossibly beautiful.

There’s a line — not Hecht’s but his editor’s — that I’ve been thinking about a lot.

“… in this urban life there dwelt the stuff of literature, not hidden in remote places, either, but walking the downtown streets, peering from the windows of sky scrapers, sunning itself in parks and boulevards.”

Picture the two men taking off their shoes and stretching their toes out in the grass. Picture their T-shirts and cargo shorts — summerwear for the young on men neither old nor young.

Imagine the crack and hiss of popping the tops on two tallboys of craft beer and the near silent gulps of the first sunny sip.

This site is coming to an end. This is its last Memorial Day story. I’ll hit 1,001 stories some time this fall and then I’ll quit, walk away like it never happened. After a few years, a decade if I’m lucky, I’ll get tired of paying for the domain name and all the stories will vanish. No old book in a dusty shop for someone to stumble across. No microfilm newspaper record for someone to scroll past in a library. All gone.

Only ego would keep it alive. I try to capture fleeting moments. It’s only fitting the words are fleeting too.

The two men talk on top of the hill. They eye pretty women and watch a small child escaped from a nearby barbecue throw a soccer ball in the air and catch it repeatedly. Throw and catch. Throw and catch.

The men sip their beers and watch the waves lap on the water’s edge. They see distant boats dissolve past the vanishing point where gaffs become mist.

They talk about the important, the silly and the things that are both. They sip aluminum-clad beer and talk about fears, hopes, cleavage and late-night cable comedy shows. Memorial Day moves on. The families start packing. Beach volleyball games wind down. Day becomes dusk and the sky takes on the same misty cast the sailboats diffused themselves into.

The moment passes and my friend and I leave the grassy hill. I don’t know if I found the stuff of literature in the living or the typing of that moment, but it feels like I came close.

Read the site’s first story

Read the second

The third

The eighteenth

Try your luck

Hawk winds peeling off the lake had spent the winter whipping water foam into a rich lather. The until-recent deep freeze had set the flocking. Sand, muck, gunk and grime had given the edges a light browning. The beach, frankly, looked delicious.

But here the metaphor becomes too clumsy to continue. Beyond the pie-top, there was nothing. The rich white fog had erased all but a few feet of lake. It looked like the edge of the universe. It looked like God’s animation budget ran out.

As “the meringue pie at the edge of the universe” is about as mixed metaphor as you can get, attention now turns to the land, to the hazy sand muck between ice and bike path where a man slowly, resolutely scanned each inch with a metal detector.

He was a fat guy, I won’t soft-pedal that. He had a chubby circle-face and a body like a former high school linebacker’s 40th birthday. His puffed hip-length jacket wasn’t doing any favors, nor were his flat-brimmed Cubs cap or the bulky headphones plugged into the detector.

His slim, short wife followed him, when she wasn’t helping their 3-year-old take little hops off the rivulets among the frozen sand.

I did try to talk to him later, and that went kerplunk. Bad questions from me; polite but pointedly short responses from him. He wanted to continue his walk with family and I botched the broach. Attention now turns to the walk.

As the little kiddo laughed, hopped and occasionally scream bloody murder in that way only a mildly inconvenienced toddler knows how, the father took small, deliberate steps along the meringue-crusted beach. He waved his wand as he moved. A slow sweep of the machine, as back-and-forth and constant as the lapping of lake on ice.

He held the detector in his right hand and dragged a short spade in his left.

A jogger went by. A woman walked a large, gray pile of fluff that could have been a dog. A young couple trod the bike path hand in hand to take advantage of the brief January spike into the 40s. His little one screamed or explored. His wife chatted with him or held the kid’s hand for little hops off sand. And the man blessed each inch with his machine.

The eventual beeping could be heard across the beach. With no change of expression, he jabbed the spade into the sand and popped out a heap. He waved his detector over the hole. It beeped again and he tossed the spadeful.

He popped out more sand, waved his machine once more. Beep. He did it a third time and the beeping stopped. He poured his spadeful on the frozen ground and waved his wand over that pile. Beep. He kicked the pile to spread it. He crouched over it and flicked through the sand until he found whatever little flake or fragment of metal aroused his machine and his hopes.

It was nothing. He flicked it away. The waves lapped on meringue and rich, white fog seeped just a hair more off invisible waters. The fat man continued his beautiful hunt, a futile tour along the water’s edge with wife and hopping child, looking for nothing but finding everything worth having.

Another waterside hunt

A drum circle on the beach since 1966

Until this story, I didn’t realize it was spelled meringue, not merengue. I had to fix this pie allegory on the backread.

I wanted every wardrobe to be a passage to Narnia, each twister a ticket to Oz. I was born a few decades too early for magical fractional train platforms, but I craved hidden places, longed for Secret Gardens and Terabithias (although with fewer dead children than the latter allows).

I had nothing in particular I wanted to escape from. My childhood was pleasant to the point of heartwarming. But I dreamed of running away to places I could only get to by going where I shouldn’t, and where everything I was told not to do would be rewarded.

The rain on Tuesday hadn’t so much surprised me as I had underestimated it.

I knew from the moment I pulled my bike out of my basement that I was in for a ride in a light mist. I hadn’t predicted the mist would become a sprinkle, the sprinkle a soft rain, the soft rain a regular rain and the regular rain a downpour that stranded me under a Metra overpass between Rosehill Cemetery and an industrial-looking vinyl shop where chubby hipsters smoked in the doorway.

Across from a bus bench advertising the implausibly named mortgage lender “Kiki Calumet,” I shook myself as dry as the wicking fabric would allow and waited for the rain to ebb.

Rosehill Cemetery was named by mistake, a flipping of letters by a city clerk after Hiram Roe sold his land based, in part, on the promise it would forever be called Roe’s Hill.

In 1859, Dr. Jacob W. Ludlum’s was the first body to enter the ground at Rosehill. Ludlum would soon be joined by several hundred Union soldiers, three Confederates and 3,000 corpses dug up and wagoned north from the former city cemetery in Lincoln Park.

Today, chubby hipsters smoke to the south and watch a soaked man in wicking fabric inspect a hole in the chain link fence by the Metra overpass.

The peeled back fence left an opening the size of a moderately skinny human.

I’m a moderately skinny human. At the odd moments I stopped caring what the smoking vinyl shoppers thought, I peered into the neverland inside.

It was a mud-and-grass slope gripped by scrubbled, sideways trees too stubborn to give. The top of the slope was the Metra track. The bottom was a separate chain-link fence keeping the hill and cemetery apart.

Among the mud and stubborn trees, there was garbage. Empty tallboys of malt liquor, plastic bottles of sports beverages, a developer sign that fell down or was tossed through, something that looked like a pizza box. It was a place for bums to sleep and teens to get high. It was a place I shouldn’t go.

Across the street, the hipsters leered. The rain clapped down and I scampered back under the train tracks. I didn’t go into my Narnia.

When I was a kid, I read books about hidden kingdoms. I wanted to live in a world filled with secret places, places I could only get to by going where I shouldn’t, and where everything I was told not to do would be rewarded.

I do. We all live in a world of secret places, of Narnias hidden by a peeled chain fence.

Read about the history of “Roe’s Hill”

Learn about the removal of city cemetery bodies

Find a hidden graffiti cavern in Chicago today

Support 1,001 Chicago Afternoons on Patreon

One was older, fatter, black and patient. The other was younger, taller, wiry and white. The younger one looked around with fight in his eyes, as if every person, ticket, metal wall and announcement voice was making him angrier.

They were leaning back on the partition walls, facing each other.

“What would you do if you didn’t have to do anything?” the older one asked.

“Like if I didn’t have to work?” the younger one responded.

“Yeah. Would you quit?”

“Quit working for the railroads?”

“Yeah,” the older man said.

The younger man paused for a moment, eyeing skeptically for the catch.

“Fuck yeah,” he said.

The older man didn’t quite sigh, but his body slumped a bit before they turned to the now-opening Metra door.

“Well there you have it then,” he said as the train opened onto Bucktown.

A few days later, a man in a bar in Edgewater was talking to other bearded men about using a medal to get a table at a restaurant.

He was young, with a reddish beard that went down to his chest. Trucker cap and flannel although he had likely never been on a rig in his 20-odd years. He was just that style of young, as affected in his way as any product-lathered sharpster.

“’What’s the medal for?’ she asked. And I said, ‘I work for a brewery that just won a silver medal for-’”

Here my own conversation picked up and I couldn’t hear the bearded man’s brag.

“And 20 minutes later, she said, ‘Come right this way, sir,’” he continued, to much laughing and back-slapping among the young bearded men.

And along Armitage a bus driver reads a newspaper at red lights. At Western, a weary liquor store owner lets homeless men get out of the cold for longer than he probably should. A woman rides the Purple Line through Rogers Park wearing a baseball cap for the Evanston Jimmy John’s.

It’s the City That Works, still is. Coldly, relentlessly, unforgivingly works. Some find happiness and restaurant tables working for a brewery. Some are old too young, begging with angry eyes to get out of the railroads.

Some just work, their jobs neither good nor bad, just a place they put on temporarily for a few hours and a few bucks at a time, like a Jimmy John’s hat.

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Read about a few people who truly love what they do:

• Making panties
• Selling gags
• Building canoes
• Dancing on rooftops

O worthy fool! One that hath been a courtier,
And says, if ladies be but young and fair,
They have the gift to know it: and in his brain,
Which is as dry as the remainder biscuit
After a voyage, he hath strange places cramm’d
With observation, the which he vents
In mangled forms. O that I were a fool!
I am ambitious for a motley coat.

Duke Senior:

Oh true dat.

…

Shakespeare wasn’t meant for the stage.

Not at least the stage we know, with proscenium arches and playbills and shushing ushers and no one under 72 except the actors.

No, the Bard was meant for a bawdy night out, “with beers in bars rather than in dumb places with no beers,” as a thin actor yelled by way of introduction to a bar full of people looking to get shitfaced and hear some Shakespeare.

The Back Room Shakespeare Project is dedicated to bringing Shakespeare back where it belongs, presenting the classic works with the rowdy disregard Willie intended.

Once a month or so-ish, a group of serious local professional actors gather. They’re in it “for the love of the game, not the chance for glory,” stakeholder and founder Kelley Ristow said by email.

The actors learn their lines, rehearse the play once and then a few days later perform it in a bar, for drunks, with no director.

The effect is taut and raucous, with actors aiming for “velocity, clarity and courage” rather than pitch-perfect dusty readings of centuries-old rhyme.

In Monday’s “As You Like It,” Kevin Matthew Reyes’ version of Charles the court wrestler appeared as a howling, grandstanding luchador. Alex Weisman’s Silvius showed his undying ardor for Phoebe by ripping off his button-up to reveal an iron-on T-shirt of her face. Tiffany Topol’s version of Rosalind-as-a-man was a kicked Yankees cap and some broseph handling of a scotch.

Melancholy Jaques listened to Tears for Fears.

But it wasn’t all gimmick and charm. It wasn’t all sly winks at the Shakespearean drag-based plot twists that would make “Three’s Company” writers shake their heads in disbelief.

Moment after moment, the cast effortlessly thread the needle from silly to sublime. They went from modern cheek to Elizabethan high drama. Yes, it’s silly how Rosalind and Orlando expressed their love, through transvestism and couplets, but the actors made you believe that love existed. The wrestling was intense and gasping, luchador mask aside.

One example of this dance from the many many many that filled this performance came during the play’s most famous speech.

“All the world’s a stage,” Thom Cox’s Jaques began, the mood and audience darkening. “And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts.”

The comedic came back as Cox/Jaques took us through the scenes in a person’s life. He acted out the “mewling and puking” of the infant, the “fair round belly with good capon lined” of middle age. The audience laughed along.

“Last scene of all,” Jaques said, the mood changing yet again. “That ends this strange eventful history, is second childishness.”

A moment. The formerly chanting, cheering, 21st-century w00ting audience waited, breath held for 400-year-old words. I saw a woman across the bar from me grip her lover’s hand.

“And mere oblivion,” he said. “Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”

Silence. Smatters of applause, a crowd that came looking for novelty touched and amazed by what they found instead.

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Meet the Back Room Shakespeare Project

Another tale of creators

And the bagpiper on the condo roof.

Peace to the newsman, chasing stories for cartoons.

Peace to the lady who jammed in Tunisia.

And peace to the one who makes really sexy ladies’ underthings.

The year is ending. Another revolution around the sun. Another slow arc of the top that never seems to unwind. Another winter night of wine and friends and winter morning of headaches and shame about how tubby Christmas made you.

It’s a time to say goodbye to the people and places of the past three-six-five. For me that means a fare thee well to those I wrote about here in  these …

These, what?

These pages? Don’t make me laugh. A short at a server somewhere in the world and these lines never happened. No library for one to stumble across a dusty old book they come to love. No song that gets caught in their ear or crumbling monument they sit upon on a picnic day.

My Chicago, vanished. My legacy the momentary darkening of some pixels on your screen and the lightening of others.

So I say goodbye to the people I met, the places I wandered, the things I saw. The drum circle at 63rd. The dancers on a South Shore roof. A woman handing out dreams on the #66 bus.

I say peace and farewell to the makers of one final canoe, to the hobbled pigeons, trainee barbers and shot girls dancing in inappropriate places.

Peace to the scientists in rooms of insects. Peace to the cackling homeless man on the bridge, the screaming one on the train and to the peaceful, loving one I don’t see in my neighborhood anymore, which is starting to make me worried.

Peace to family, friends and unicycle salesmen.

I wish peace to the seasons, to the homeless man pushed through an ugly spring rain.

To the smoke and sweat of a summer-clogged night.

To the little girl laughing as the bubbles float to the street in an endless warm fall.

And peace to the communists holding court in the snow.

Peace to you, 2013. To the men and women and inanimate objects I fell in love with just enough to write about on a site one power surge from oblivion.

Peace and goodbye.

And to you, 2014, and to all the people, places, objects and hilarious shitheads I will meet in the next three-six-five, I say hello.

Peace and hello.

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Take a survey on the stories of 2013

The big table takes up most of the space on the back deck of the top-floor apartment. It’s surrounded by potted plants, including the one that provided the sprigs of mint Allie Deaver would soon put in the heavily sugared green tea she was making with a Tunisian recipe.

The big table is on a deck at an apartment building in a pocket neighborhood in Edgewater. Aïn Draham is in the Jendouba Governorate in northwestern Tunisia.

“It’s like the foothills of the Atlas Mountains. You’re about 30 kilometers south of the Mediterranean. It’s beautiful. Absolutely breathtaking scenery,” she said. “It’s mountains. It’s cedar forests. It’s not what you might expect thinking of North Africa.”

Allie Deaver is a flautist. For the past two years, Deaver, 28, has gone to North Africa as part of Cultures in Harmony. The eight-year-old nonprofit sends American classical musicians to Tunisia, to Zimbabwe, to Mexico and Papua New Guinea and Cameroon and Afghanistan and points east west north and south for a simple task.

To jam. They find local musicians and jam with them.

“You have this combination of Western classical music, traditional Arab music, everything in between,” Deaver said, leaving the big table momentarily to check on the tea.

Cultures in Harmony’s Tunisian program is in two parts. First, there’s a weeks long music camp for children aged 7 to 22. Then there’s the “Musical Caravan,” a series of outreach concerts in rural areas, rehearsing and performing with Tunisian musicians to create on-the-spot fusions. Improvised jams somewhere between Mozart and “Maktoub.”

“These people are sometimes just incredibly gifted and incredibly dedicated musicians, but during the day they’re like a pharmacist,” Deaver said. “It’s great to go to countries where music-making is valued by everybody to the point where everybody can participate.”

Deaver isn’t sure how the word is spread to the musicians. Madame Hanen, the Tunisian woman who organizes the caravan, speaks almost no English. But the musicians show up, town after rural town.

“When we went to Béja, we had these people who were like ‘I’m into metal and progressive rock and we’re in a band. Can we play some of our stuff for you?’ And we were like, ‘Sure. Go for it.’ And it was actually pretty good. Béja was interesting because last year when we did the Musical Caravan in Béja, there were actually protestors. I’m not clear on whether they were aligned with a certain group or organization or Islamic sect, but they didn’t really want us there.”

The protestors weren’t violent, she said quickly, but “They were protesting us. They were there for us.”

The musicians were whisked away and the locations for the both the pre-concert workshop and the concert itself changed.

“The security situation in Tunisia this year is a little more unpredictable because of things that are going on along the Algerian border, which is of course where we were most of the time,” Deaver said.

She heard of “some skirmishes,” she said, but news was hard to come by, mostly gossip from the older students about weapons smuggling from Algeria to Libya.

The Tunisian students were meanwhile horrified by the American security situation.

“When I was over there, there was that shooting in Uptown where like five people were randomly shot in a drive-by or something, and I made some remark about that occurring. I said something like ‘Oh my gosh, there were five people shot a mile and a half from where I live.’ And one of the girls goes, ‘Oh my God, how can you feel safe there?’”

The students at the music camp in Aïn Draham were mostly middle class urban Tunisians, she said. They were musically inclined, charming, fun, sloppily dressed, iPhone obsessed, English-speaking teens in the process of growing up on Western television and Adele albums.

They were the type of kids whose parents would send them to weeks long music camps over the summer.

There were 40 students last year, about 24 this year because Ramadan and the Tunisian school year had an odd crossover on the calendar and the camp wasn’t as convenient for a lot of the parents.

Deaver, a Naperville native and flautist with the chamber orchestra bar band Classical Revolution Chicago (oh, you better believe I’ll be doing a story on that), has been to North Africa twice now. Now sipping the Tunisian tea recipe she learned in Egypt, she said the cultural exchange went both ways.

Before one concert, an excited cultural attaché handed them sheet music for Tunisian standards “Maktoub” and “Takht Yasmina” with the request to play. Madame Hanen happened to have some traditional Tunisian dresses in her car.

“And we’re sight-reading ‘Maktoub’ while wearing these traditional gowns while also having to improvise all the solos and this occurred right on the spot. But then I also had to turn around and perform a movement of a Poulenc sonata but this is after we’re trying to teach a bunch of Arab kids which is after I had to jam with a ney player,” she said, laughing. “Ney is the traditional Arab flute, which is played from the side of your mouth. I can’t figure out how to make a sound out of it, but I felt a little better when he couldn’t figure out how to make a sound out of my flute.”

The hostel where the music camp students stayed made ends meet by hosting weddings, Deaver said. They had weddings every night except for one of the Jumu’ah prayer nights on Fridays. Nightly weddings and 24 music camp kids made an annoying combination for the hostel’s owners.

“After a while they started coming up with these activities to get the kids out of the way because the kids would just crash the weddings. I, uh, crashed a couple of them with the kids,” she said, glancing down a little sheepishly before excitedly describing the party favor she scored at one.

“One of the nights they organized this hike up to the top of the mountain. They did a campfire. We’re just sitting there eating our dinner and Hanen, actually, starts singing a traditional northwestern Tunisian folk song that they would sing at weddings. It was just such a cool moment because it happened out of nowhere. Someone had dragged a darbuka, the drum, up with them… some of the kids had their guitars.

“It just turned into this jam session up at the top of this mountain where everyone was singing,” she said, smiling.

A song sung in the foothills of the Atlas Mountains by Aïn Draham still resonates by a big table in Edgewater, Chicago.

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Listen to “Maktoub”

Listen to “Takht Yasmina”

Listen to Classical Revolution Chicago perform a piece written by Madame Hanan’s son

Learn about Cultures in Harmony

Read the founder’s blog

The headless lamb, an ancient grave marker decapitated by time, lets us know that Nelly sleeps. No date. No last name. Just three weatherworn words embossed on white marble: “Our Nelly Sleeps.”

Above the ground, the Memorial Day crowd waits for the men in Civil War uniforms to stop reading names of the war dead so they can hear the cannons fire off. It’s what “most, if not all of you are here for,” one of the re-enactor officers jokes with resignation to the red, white, blue crowd under the grim, cloudy sky.

Children play tag among the graves.

“If you get tagged, you’re dead!” a little white boy yells to his friends.

A mother makes her child pose on a curved gravestone for a photo. She wants to show Facebook how well her child balances.

The crowd waves flags and claps at appropriate times as the men in Union uniforms talks about the sacrifices of the dead. The parents are mostly proper, the children always children. A few old men sit tucked under blankets in lawn chairs.

ROTC groups from different high schools marched in the parade that led the crowd up to Rosehill. Police bagpipers played George M. Cohan songs. “Grand Old Flag.” “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” “Over There.”

But the parade was over now. The crowd suffered through remembering the Civil War dead and a primer on the history of Memorial Day becoming a federal holiday. A chaplain in a Union uniform in a few deft words trivialized any besmirch on the loving, kind, super-cool God who watches His children slice each other open and rain death.

He asks how God could allow war, allow pain, allow death, allow his basement to flood a week earlier. The crowd laughs at that last switch. He’s a very clever chaplain. “Thou Shalt Not Kill” from a man in an army uniform.

The families wait for the talk to end. They wait for the cannons to go boom boom so they can leave and warm up after the chill spring morning. The firing guns will blast the names of the dead out of the audience’s mind. The martial dead’s moment of being remembered will be gone. Those unfortunate enough to die in peace aren’t remembered at all. Time is the enemy of both lion and lamb.

And under it all, under the waving flags and booming cannons, under the trappings of war, under the balancing children, police pipers, marching teens, gray skies and under a marble lamb broken off at a neck worn smooth by time. Under it all, Nelly sleeps.

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