The day after the Des Plaines river crested, when O’Hare Airport and portions of the Dan Ryan, Edens, Eisenhower, and Kennedy Expressways were closed due to flooding, I headed out of my hotel to eat normal food for the first time in two weeks. I remember that the sun emerged weakly as it set in the cloud-strewn skies as I walked to a bistro on Davis Street, and that the sunlight was enough to fill me with hope. The world felt utterly calmer than it had just 24 hours earlier when I first arrived in Chicago from Cairo.
I spent that first night, April 18, alone in the massive Chancellor’s Suite of the Orrington Hotel, trying to ignore the shaking of the windows and shutters in the wind and thunder, while periodically flicking on the TV to see if Boston was any closer to finding the Boston Marathon bomber brother still at large. (To be continued)