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.

A few months back I knocked on the door of a storefront on Cottage Grove, but not any storefront. THAT storefront. The one with the handpainted signs offering blues CDs, afrocentric books, King Tut and a once in a lifetime chance to meet the man himself, the one the only, the legend — Johnny Twist.

The door opened before I got my hand re-lowered. The man was there, asking for five dollars.

Johnny Twist was wearing a leather hat, leather vest and I’m pretty sure a leather sports coat the day I ventured into his shop. He had a massive shark tooth hanging from his neck and he talked like slick magic as he squired me in the shop.

The sign calls it the Mississippi Chicago Blues Historical Museum, I think. It’s hard to tell on the hand-painted plywood where the eye is expected to go next. But whichever direction those five words run, they’re inaccurate. It’s a museum dedicated to one man: Johnny Twist.

Johnny Twist is a bluesman, a living legend he tells me once I pay my $5 admission. His store-museum is a temple of blues, but a temple of himself. There are old letters from blues legends, sent to Johnny Twist. There are photos of Johnny Twist, article clippings. There are his records, his old posters, his history.

Johnny Twist jumps from story to story repeating one phrase: “Nobody gets around Johnny Twist.”

He says that when he talks about the record companies wanting to dupe him, the European success he knows he has because of an old magazine article from Germany. He talks about page counts of each article and one by one shows me as if I don’t believe that he’s been in ink. He tells me stories about Koko Taylor, Ike Turner and a man in Maxwell Street Market when it was the blues haven of Jewtown who had a trained chicken act. They were all good — especially the chicken — but nobody gets around Johnny Twist.

He alludes to dark forces with long reaches for scuttling his career, making him forgotten instead of in his rightful place in the blues pantheon. But it’s OK because nobody gets around Johnny Twist.

His daughter comes in while Johnny Twist and I talk. She is lovely and kind. I like her for her sweetness and summery smile, the same way I like her father for his wildness. I ask him for an interview — a real one, sitting down and talking and getting my questions answered.

He doesn’t directly ask for money, just tells me about the GoFundMe page he’s using to try to keep the museum afloat, maybe add to it?

I say sure. It’s a breach of journalistic ethics to pay for interviews, but I don’t get around Johnny Twist either. I want this shop to live. I want him to have the money.

We fist bump — Johnny Twist won’t shake my hand — and I make a pledge. Father and daughter say they’ll check for the donation. I hop in my rental car, head home and promptly don’t make the donation I promised.

Weeks passed before I get around to it. Then they never got in touch. I never tried to reach out again. My main guess is they gave up on me and then didn’t notice when I finally made good on my promise. But I did pay the money so am getting the story.

His GoFundMe has a $100,000 goal. He’s $450 in. It’s been two months and my $20 is still the last donation listed. Maybe they wanted $30.

The museum on Cottage Grove in Woodlawn is a musician’s wild temple to himself where he lurks two feet behind the door. It’s packed past gills with memorabilia. No photos allowed, not that I would have wanted to take them. Photos would give you the illusion that you’d been there, act as another weight on the side of the scale that says “Stay home and watch TV.” It would give you too much of a taste of the place and I want to leave you hungry.

I want you to get off your ass and drive down to Woodlawn, park your own car by 6455 S. Cottage Grove Ave. and foist your own five bucks into the waiting hand of living legend — and you can take the man’s word that he is one — Johnny Twist. Nobody gets around him.

Listen to Johnny Twist’s “The Get It”

And “Why I Play the Blues”

“Sure is Fun”

The Germans do love him

South Side Weekly did a beautiful profile of him

Meet fellow Woodlawn resident Downtown Brown

Read about another true original

Now let’s talk about the lake.

Chicago exists because of water, with the early 1830s land boom that created the city a byproduct of a plan to dig a canal connecting the Chicago River to the Illinois River and, via that, the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River systems.

As far back as 1836, a year before the town of Chicago became the city of Chicago, the lakefront was deemed “Public Ground—Forever Open, Clear and Free of any Buildings, or Other Obstruction Whatever.”

The rules protecting this land have changed over the years — the Field Museum wouldn’t be able to build on the lake by today’s laws, as George Lucas can attest. But that guiding principle of a public lakefront is why Chicago has open fields, beaches and bike paths instead of private beaches divvied between condo developments like Miami, or skyscrapers all the way up to the water like Manhattan.

This tour isn’t about the rules; it’s about the people who pushed their buildings further and further into parkland, “transforming the breathing spot for the poor into a showground of the educated rich” as Montgomery Ward put it in the early 1900s.

I’ve written about some of these places before, and there you can find links to stories about how people use this lake. Other spots on the tour I left silent for you to wonder and maybe research how this got there.

It was the first thing he had said through the cab partition in about five minutes. He hadn’t blinked or batted an eye when I asked him to take me 12 miles to the stately stone towers of the University of Chicago’s Hyde Park campus, a place more movie set than neighborhood.

Instead, he told me he lived seven blocks from there. He said he could drop by his home and kiss his wife, his initial plan before he came up with the breakfast idea.

“She’d like that,” he said of the kiss.

Over those winding 12 miles, as we went from highway to the less-than-stately streets of Woodlawn to the Hyde Park movie set, this story came out in bits and chunks and pieces. Nothing was said in the order it appears and all I can vouch for accuracy is that Downtown Brown told me so.

They called him Downtown Brown because he would work the downtown area 30, 40 years ago when the other South Side cabbies stuck in the neighborhood. The dispatchers would tease that he was goofing off because no one in the neighborhood would see him around.

“If you get 10 of them together, I bet none of them would know my first name. People have asked me ‘What’s your name?’ and I’ve said, ‘Brown.’ ‘Yeah, but what’s your name?’ ‘Brown.’”

I asked his first name. He told me. I’m not telling you.

His father was a man named Brown and his mother married a man named Brown after, so there was no concern about changing names. Both his parents would have other children, but he was forbidden from using “half” when describing them.

“There was no half-brother, half-sister. He was my brother. She was my sister.”

He’s kept up good relations, even able to stay at his late father’s wife’s house when he’s out east, “as if it were my own.”

He grew up playing basketball along 63rd and was pretty good, he said. He would run people out, he said in an elderly, cracking voice. He would run them up and down the court and they wouldn’t be able to keep up with him. They’d be panting, tongues out and then he and a friend would alley-oop, pass, fake or simply lay up to score.

He married the wife he still wants to kiss in 1964. She had a daughter from a previous relationship. He raised her as his own, just like the second Brown his mother married raised him. The daughter died a few years ago.

“At the age of 52,” Brown said.

Brown and his wife had two other children: a daughter who is a minister in Texas and a son who didn’t come up in the story much. At different points, all the children and several of the grandchildren lived in different apartments in the same building, a family down the hall, downstairs, out by the corridor, spilling out through the building.

“I love them grandkids,” Brown said, smiling and leaning forward a little behind the wheel.

It was hard when his daughter went to become a minister, particularly as she left her daughter behind with Brown and his wife. His daughter was worried about the youngest one’s safety. Brown promised to keep his granddaughter from the streets the same way he kept his own three kids.

“I told her, ‘I kept you in this cab. I’ll keep her.’”

He raised his children and grandchildren in the cab, lining them up in the front seat to keep them safe, keep them close. When only one child was there, he would lay a pillow in his lap and give him or her room to stretch out and doze.

He did the same thing with the granddaughter.

“She would wake up and say, ‘I love you,’” he said, mentioning a sweet nickname she would call him that I forgot. “And the passengers would be ‘There’s a baby in here!’ They didn’t know. They thought I was crazy. They thought I was talking to myself.”

He laughed.

That granddaughter still lives with Brown and his wife he was going to kiss and take to breakfast. In the wood three-flats and vacant lots of Woodlawn, seven blocks and a world from Hyde Park’s stately stone, the 26-year-old lives in her grandparents’ spare room.

University of Chicago medical students need to save their money.

“You must be proud,” I said.

“Oh, I am,” he said, smiling behind the wheel of the cab where he raised a doctor.

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Listen to me today (May 12, 2014) on WBEZ’s “The Afternoon Shift”