The Romantic vs The Realist

When I tell people that I grew up in a suburb of Chicago, they think I lived in the city.  They couldn't be more wrong.  Carol Stream, at the time I lived there, didn't even have its own post office.  We had a gas station and a small grocery store.  Of course it had a library, schools, and parks, but we were secluded.  A little village insulated from the city by the farmland that surrounded us.  It was safe, clean, and idyllic (ah, how childhood memories have a rosey tint to them).

Having lived near Chicago, I was fortunate enough to visit the city often.  After all, it was where my mother grew up, where my parents met and lived for a time, where some of my extended family lived, and the home of the Chicago Cubs.  Not to mention Chicago had amazing architecture, museums, and other cultural attractions (it still does).  My experiences in Chicago, growing up, were warm, fun, and educational because they were either family outings or school field trips.

I suppose I am a bit of a romantic, in that I want to believe cities are the way they are portrayed in novels and fun,romantic films.  I want Chicago to be the Chicago of Ferris Bueller's Day Off.  I want New York to be the New York of An Affair to Remember and You've Got Mail.  I imagine living in a city to be this wonderful, eclectic, artistic, romantic adventure in which I meet a suave Cary Grant figure sauntering down a clean, well lit, sidewalk in front of a row of Brownstones. However, the realist in me knows those cities are also dirty, dangerous, loud, chaotic, and expensive. I can satisfy the romantic in me and have those idealized cities, so long as I am only visiting them and only the romantic parts of them.  I can also pacify the realist in me by promising to never live there.  Until a few years ago, this compromise worked well, and the romantic and the realist lived in harmony.  Then I went to New Orleans.

After my first day in the French Quarter, the romantic stuffed a beignet in the mouth of the realist and refused to hear how dangerous, dirty, and expensive cities are.  The romantic took complete control and reveled in the unique, historic, progressive, artistic, eclectic culture of the French Quarter.  In a city to which I was a stranger, I felt as if I had finally found my way home.  I fell in love, and there was nothing the realist could do about it.