The Contemplative Eye

The brilliant beach you see here is in the sizzling tropical splendor of—well—Chicago.

It’s true. I was there last July with Mary for a niece’s wedding, and it was ding-dong hot. Two weeks later, the groom’s Indian parents hosted a repeat wedding for the couple, a traditional Hindu ceremony in Piscataway, New Jersey, where Mary and I were asked to stand in for our niece’s parents when her real parents didn’t show up because one of them was deathly ill—but got a lot better the following week. (I foresee years of therapy on that.)

Anyway, that’s Chicago. Twelve years ago, I talked my mother- and father-in-law into moving from a lonely retirement in the pathological heat of Houston, Texas, to join us in Maine—over protests of “Oh, it’s too cold!”—by cracking the library’s NOAA reference books and demonstrating that coastal Maine is substantially warmer in winter (and cooler in summer) than Chicago, a perfectly popular American city full of our relations, none of whom says, “Oh, it’s too cold. And too hot.” Even though they probably should.

Still, after many happy, comfortable years in Maine, my father-in-law died in December 2004 and was buried at a veterans’ cemetery near the state capital of Augusta. And in a few more years, one supposes, his wife will join him there. Which means that, being 40 miles inland and given global warming, the site’ll probably be both colder and hotter than Chicago after all.

Ah, factoids.