Bad Manners

Today my son Jacob and I drove my sister, Katja, to O'Hare Aiport in Chicago. After a business meeting in Cedar Rapids she had flown to Illinois to see us for two days before returning to Frankfurt, Germany. It was a short but lovely time.

As Jacob and I were leaving O'Hare he asked "what are we going to do now?" "We're going home," I said. "But there is nothing to do at home," he said. "Well," I said, "there is the lawn for you to mowe." Jacob made a face, but didn't say anything. "Isn't there something we can do in Chicago?" he asked. "I'm sure there are lots of things one can do in Chicago," I said, "but I wouldn't want to just try them without planning them first." I started talking about the traffic, the people, how crowded it would likely be on this beautiful Sunday before Memorial Day. But Jacob wasn't deterred. A quiet voice inside my head kept saying "Why not? He's right! Are you really just going to drive back to Champaign? Have an adventure!"
I pulled up on the shoulder, looked at him and said "what would you like to do?" How about he Sears Tower," he said. "Okay," I agreed, "let's try that."

As soon as we pulled back into traffic and drove past the exit ramp that would have taken us home we hit dense traffic. I moaned quietly, more to myself than audible to him, but he did hear it. "See," I said, "this is what I expected." Secretly I was hatching plans to turns around and escape. But traffic became more fluid within a minute and soon were driving towards Chicago's down-town with the Sears Tower in full view. "You know," he said, "it's not called 'Sears Tower' anymore. They renamed it 'Phyllis Tower.'" "Really," I said, "that's an aweful name for this tower." We both joked about who this 'Phyllis' might be and what was so great about her to have booted out the name 'Sears' for the tower. There was more dense traffic, actually, but we kept on talking and pretty soon we were close enough to the tower to consider getting off the high-way.

We pulled off at Jackson Blvd., drove one block and parked the car for two hours. Sears--Willis-Tower as it is actually now called--was in plain view and we walked there in less than five minutes. The streets were pretty empty on this Sunday and I already thought I had been wrong about crowds, etc. There was a short line of about 30 people in front of the street entrance to the Skydeck, but it resolved quickly and before we knew it were beckoned into an elevator by a nice young man with long dread-locks. Just as the elevator doors closed the young man looked at us and said--as if overcome by a sudden need to tell us the truth--"it'll be about an hour until you get there." Jacob and I looked at each other in disbelief but agreed we'd give it a try. The elevator doors soon opened into a large lobby-like area containing about 300 people. This line, too, moved relatively quickly. About 15 minutes later we had made it through their security detail and past a commercial photo-shoot for everyone who wanted to later buy a photo of themselves in front ofthe photoshopped Chicago skyline. We were ushered into another room, still no elevators in sight. This room contained a line of about 500 people. Much slower moving this line started to contain an increasing amount of people fanning themselves with their programs, parents carrying their exhausted children and other people who looked dazed and seemed to quietly ask themselves why they had made this choice.

It was here that our "new behavior" started. Jacob had spotted a few open spaces in the line in front of us and he quickly and in his usual agile way wove himself through the people standing in front of us with me following right on his heels (not quite as agile). We had moved past about 30 people and felt great.

A sign on the wall said "Time until movie starts" underneath a digital clock counting backwards had just crossed from 10 minutes over to 9:59. We didn't know this, but before we could get to the elevator we had to sit through a movie. 9 more minutes to go, though, and Jacob used this time to explain some of baseball's ground rules to me (as there were large flat-screen televisions in this room two of which showing base-ball games). I found out that my son, in spite of his German father, is truly also an American boy who knows about baseball. Thank you, Jacob, I now know more about baseball (including to which teams the batter, pitcher and catcher belong) than I knew just minutes earlier.

The movie we were waiting to see lasted, fortunately, only seven minutes. We left through a door different from the one we had come in through into yet another room, crowded as the previous one, containing about 300 people. This line was not moving at all when we first entered the room. People looked uncomfortable and somewhat a bit like they had been had: this entire journey to the Skydeck was taking too long, no doubt. Jacob, again scouting out the situation, pointed to an open door that, strangely opened to the front part of the queue of people at whose end we were standing. "We could just go through there and be almost at the elevators," he announced. I was undecided. If we walked through there, I thought, we would likely cause a rebellion and risk being lynched on the spot. We inched closer to the door. And when the line seemed to move just a bit, we quickly slipped in and, suddenly, were almost in front of the elevators, only about 50 people in front of us. The elevator left once more without us, but then we got in and were taken, in less than a minute, to the 103 floor of the Tower.

As soon as we exited the elevator we saw what would expect us on our way back: another long line. Approximately 150 people were waiting to get back down. Perhaps, we said, we could take the stairs and race each other down the 2000 plus steps. Unfortunately, after spending about 10 minutes on the deck, the stairs had been closed and, instead of leaping down those steps, we got in line for the elevator down. Quickly Jacob spotted another opportunity to speed things up for us. We briskly moved into the lacuna that had opened up passing about 40 people. We had just relaxed into our new position in the line, when someone tugged at my arm. A stern looking African-American gentleman looked me straight in the eye and said "You know you just cut in front of us." He was the kind of older man you know won't hurt you, but he had that authority about him that said "don't mess with me." So, I didn't. I said "yes, I know." His wife, standing next to him, was visibly angry saying something about entitlement and false privilege. "I know," I said, "and I can appreciate you being mad about it, because I would be too, if I were you. But we have somewhere to get to (I didn't say that it was our car we had to get to which I worried would be towed, if we ran out of pre-purchased parking time). They got into the elevator with us, but no more words were exchanged. However, in the second elevator (again with a line of about 50 people forming in front of it), he stared at me, clearly communicating his disapproval. I stared back a moment, but then opened my mouth to say what had been on my mind since we first starting talking to each other: "You know," I said, "otherwise,if not for this, we would be friends." He smiled. "I am Martin," I said. He didn't answer me and he never gave me his name. He did say "You're teaching your son bad manners."

Oh, how much I wish I had had the courage to say "No, you got that all wrong! It's my son who is teaching me bad manners. And I'm really enjoying it! Because on my own I would have never tried this. But my intuition had left me stranded at that moment. It wasn't so much his final comment that got to me than it was the fact that I didn't want to seem like I was blaming my son for our bad manners.

"Bad manners?" Jacob said in the car. "I wasn't teaching you bad manners. I was teaching you survival skills."

Yes, Jacob, you taught me survival skills in many ways today. You didn't only do that by showing me how to effectively cut in front of people. You also reminded me that it can be fun to do something on the very spur of the moment. That it is not always necessary to plan, that all it takes is the wish to do something, that even standing in line for long times can be okay when peppered with comments an observations about all the people around you. You reminded me, Jacob, that when the goal is a peak (or a skydeck) or some other pinnacle it is often the journey there and back that matters the most. You're an awesome teacher!