I read a few more of the names into the recorder I brought with me that ride day in July, but I couldn’t find the good recorder that morning. What tape I have is minutes of crackling and wind. I make out odd words like “pine cones,” “birds,” “Symphony Shores” and “I ask why, but HUSBAND Harry Davies (1880-1949) won’t answer.”

I’m typing this in October and I can’t remember why I found the graveyard so loving.

If this weekslong ramble northward to wrap up the site has a purpose, it’s to find the city’s themes. I found labor and futility where the factories rot. I found community, home and hope in the neighborhoods older relatives have told me never to go to. And here, spurred by a graveyard at 71st and Cottage Grove, I found memory.

Or I found what I can’t remember.

I do remember the tree.

It was, and presumably still is, a large tree floofing out into hefty, weight-supporting branches only a foot or two off the ground. One long branch crooked horizontal for a length of close-enough parameters that a slightly chubbed middle-aged blogger wearing khaki cargo shorts over bike togs could sit in the tree, lay along the branch and stare at a pine cone-filtered sky.

I’m not saying I climbed a tree in a graveyard, Mom, but I’m not saying I didn’t.

As I sat in my tree, I talked into the bad recorder — not bad, per se, but so sensitive and un-windscreened whatever I said was lost between breeze and bird. I remember loving what I said into that recorder. I remember thinking this was good, solid, gave a sense of the Greater Grand Crossing neighborhood in a way both accurate and avoiding the white tourism this bike ride risked turning into.

It’s just scratches and wind now, and I think that’s somewhat appropriate.

We live in lost history, with HUSBAND Harry Davies’ entire life crammed in that dash between 1880 and 1949. If we’re lucky, a few words spring through the noise. A name, a date, a moment caught on tape forgetting the fancy word for trees with needles. (It’s “conifer,” I remembered later.)

What better place to remember memory than in a graveyard?

Later, I’d head north. Later, I’d run into the line of crosses a Jesus guy put along Halsted to mourn Englewood’s dead. I ran that story early as #961. Later I’d ring through construction zones, try and fail to find the end of Bubbly Creek (ran that one early too) and ended up playing ’90s video games at a retro-themed hipster coffee shop in Bridgeport. That’s where we’ll pick up on Monday.

I guess Ida B. Wells is buried in Oak Woods Cemetery, the internet tells me later. And Harold Washington, Enrico Fermi, Junior Wells and Kenesaw Mountain Landis. The internet’s a wonderful thing, although I almost fell down a Wikipedia wormhole just now looking up pathologist-poet Maud Slye, forever sharing Oak Woods with the activist and missionary Nancy Green, who funded her antipoverty work by appearing as Aunt Jemima.

But I didn’t know any of that in my tree. I just knew pine cones and conifer needles. Birds, cicadas, airplanes and the honks of both car and the Metra Electric in the distance.

She taps her foot as she sits in the one barstool not sitting bottom up on a table. It’s morning yet, and the floors are still clean. The stools are still stacked. The drinking day hasn’t begun, so the young woman has a moment to tap her foot and check up on the world.

She is young and lovely, sharp and fashionable. The bartender has become a storied figure, a stock character of wisdom and patience for no real reason other than that writers used to like to romanticize booze, and they liked the guy who handed them each glass. But the rest of the service industry gets short shrift, although they’re just as savvy, wise and sharp.

Waiters are a stock character of bad romantic comedy, the slightly effete man working on an acting career when not plenishing water, apps or checks. Waitresses are sexual in these films, the object for the bad boyfriend to ogle and smack the ass of. But through some ’40s notion that Hemingway had any idea what the hell he was talking about, a bartender is seen as wise.

She taps her foot and checks her phone.

The brewpub is a Marz venture, one of the Bridgeport-area gambits of the Marszewski boys, locals who manage to pull off that rare trick of creating things both beautiful and soulful, both authentic and new. Maria’s Packaged Goods and Community Bar is theirs. So is Kimski, the Polish-Korean fusion joint from the Polish-Korean fusion Marszewskis. They also do the Co-Prosperity Sphere, Lumpen Magazine and Lumpen’s accompanying 105.5 on the radio.

The taproom sits at the end of Bubbly Creek.

At the end of Bubbly Creek, on a street called Iron in a town that no longer makes steel, the wet muck that slaughterhouses spewed and Upton Sinclair raked has been replaced with dryness. Gravel lots for city vehicles, trucks from a smatter of warehouses grinding white grit as they pile down the roads. There are fewer vehicles now, I guess. Fewer jobs, fewer ways to pay for kids by lifting and hauling and slicing pigs’ throats.

That’s what I’m told, at least.

The end of Bubbly Creek offers no access without trespassing into one of these places. I move north along dry gravel, seeking some place I can see water.

Standing on the bridge that crosses the creek, McKinley Park to the west and Bridgeport to the east, I stare south from 35th at these defining waters. This once-bubbling water of blood and grit meant Chicago, for all the horror and abuse and wealth and security it created. We took on the filth to provide the nation its breakfast meat. We got the fat-slick water, they got the sausage.

Now our south river’s south jut has no more idea what to do than we do. Are we robust or cosmopolitan? Are we the engine of industry or the height of fashion? Do we make the sausage or brunch upon it?

I don’t know, and Bubbly Creek isn’t saying. The once-roiling waters of filth and jobs are quiet, and still.

Tales of Bridgeport

Tales of McKinley Park

Old Joe of Canaryville

“Sup dood,” the email read. “I hope you’re doing well.”

Everyone has those friends, the ones you don’t see nearly often enough. The ones who used to be a constant fixture in your life, but a slight tweak of situation — a move a few miles south, a job that gets you too busy, coursework that takes her away — means you look at a calendar and realize it’s been months.

I hadn’t seen her since New Year’s Eve, when a few folks went to Chinatown for hot pot before heading to a party I decided to skip. Before that, we had gotten lunch in November or December. Before that, it might have been her birthday party at the Galloping Ghost arcade in July.

The world turns, the clock hands spin, the sand goes through the hourglass — pick your metaphor.

I’ve written about this friend before. She and her boyfriend Eddie snuck me into a speakeasy arcade in Logan Square once.

We had long conversations about death in an abandoned Humboldt Park warehouse where she worked.

I bashed her head in with a croquet mallet as part of a no-budget horror movie that same Eddie made back when they were just friends who couldn’t take their eyes off each other.

Our gang played drunken croquet in Humboldt Park every Sunday night for four beautiful summers. She was my companion in endless misadventures of bikes and booze and picnics and long talks about any topic.

But she and Eddie moved south. My personal life got turbulent. I pulled in from life. She pulled away from social media. Neither of us has a car.

So I wasn’t surprised when news filtered to me that Krystle and Eddie eloped.

The “Sup dood” email was Krystle reaching out to say we should get together. She had spoken to a mutual friend and was feeling nostalgic. Mortuary school graduation is approaching, so she’ll have more time to see “the old gang,” as she put it.

A few days later, that same mutual friend got permission to spill the beans on Facebook. Eddie and Krystle had eloped on Valentine’s Day. My friend, my Lucy, ran off with the man she loves. They started a life when everyone’s back was turned.

It’s perfect that they eloped. It’s them.

There are plans afoot for a summertime barbecue to celebrate both graduation and marriage, some “wedding croquet and cake fight,” as that same mutual friend put it.

I’ll be there. I’ll congratulate them and hug Krystle so hard her ribs crack. “The old gang” will laugh and reminisce over stories that get more exaggerated and meaty with each retelling.

And whatever happens next in our lives is whatever happens next. I want new beginnings for the old gang. And, this time, I don’t want to miss a thing.

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