Mea Culpa NASCAR

Elsa the Westie and I routed ourselves around the sidewalk construction barrier, down the block and around the corner to the park. I’d spent the early morning alone, lamenting this week’s Supreme Court decisions that flattened civil and human rights. A fellow dog-walker stopped me mid-thought.

 “Now they’re giving driver’s licenses to those immigrants!”

It mattered not that she was the owner of a cute little dog, she instantly turned savage in my eyes.

“So what?” I said. “Now they can drive to work.”

‘Work? They’re not working. They’re just laying around outside the police station.”

Elsa and I were both satisfied with her morning duties. I grabbed a coffee at the walk-up cafe. We settled in to soak up the morning airs with a friend on a bench near the tennis courts, dismissing the ugly of the street conversation.

A couple wearing Purdue t-shirts had circled the track and eyeballed Elsa. As they approached, my thoughts turned to the political atmosphere in Indiana. I wondered if they, too, wanted to speak hatefully of the asylum-seekers who made their way from Venezuela to Chicago, mostly on foot. 

“We had a 16-year old Westie who just died.”

Ah, sweet relief. Dog talk.

After sympathies for their dead dog, my recent dead dog, and all the dogs we’ve ever owned, the conversation turned to their new home in Carmel, Indiana, where they retired from a life of teaching in central Illinois. An arts colony, they called it. I must give off an it’s-ok-to-talk-to-me-about-politics aroma since the conversation led into the difference between the people of Indiana and Illinois. They gave us a for-instance.

 “We went to a James Taylor concert a few weeks ago in Carmel,” the man said, “when he announced he lived in California, the audience booed.”

 And there it is again; uninvited discomfort creeping into my life, demanding an audience. More sympathies all around for the Illinois couple and their unanticipated Hoosier life. At least they had a Chicago retreat and park-bench strangers like me to complain to. 

 But who am I kidding? 

I started the weekend so contemptuous of NASCAR coming to Chicago that I was itching to be heard. The sidewalks were so empty at the start of the Fourth of July weekend, I figured all the residents had Air B&B’d their condos to NASCAR fans. Every time I saw people wheeling their suitcases down the street, looking at directions on their phones, I muttered to myself, “NASCAR”.

 And then it rained. In fact Mayor Johnson said it was the most rainfall on the city since 1987. I turned on the TV to guess what? NASCAR—just as Dale Earnhardt, Jr. announced the cars were passing Chicago Symphony Center. What a thrill to see my city washed clean, a shining backdrop to those who came here to show it off. 

I’ve never been comfortable with monoculturalism, where everyone looks and thinks alike. But contempt for the Other, those with differing views and interests, has given me nothing but backaches.