No. 226 – Lorelei

Performer: Styx

Songwriters: Dennis DeYoung, James Young

Original Release: Equinox

Year: 1975

Definitive Version: Return to Paradise, 1997.

I moved to Chicago on Sept. 15, 2005, not quite a year to the day after I met Laurie. The timing was important, because I had an interview for a job with Chicago Home & Garden magazine, as I mentioned, Sept. 16.

The Clippers missed the playoffs that year, so I had wrapped up my work there the previous week. Although it was never not fun, the second year of scoring games wasn’t nearly as much fun or as magical as the previous year had been. The pressbox crew had changed a bit, and I missed having both Chris and Bill—two comrades—in the booth. (Chris and Bill both took new jobs early in the year.) Heck, even the hot-dog races weren’t as entertaining as they had been in 2004.

I didn’t take much to Chicago. Even if I had wanted to, there wasn’t enough room for much of my stuff in Laurie’s apartment anyway. I as much clothing as I could fit in Laurie’s coat closet, my two Molson wood crates filled with books, two boards that I could use to build a makeshift bookshelf in the dining room (shades of college) and two paper boxes filled with notebooks and folders of research. I think I brought one more box of odds and ends, some videotapes, a pillow, that sort of thing. My car was fuller going to Wabash for school.

I said my goodbyes and began the transition to the newest, perhaps craziest, chapter to my life with this song running through my head if not on my car stereo. That said, at no time was there any doubt in my mind that this wasn’t the thing I wanted to do. I didn’t know what the future held, but I knew that I wanted to be with Laurie.

It rained that day, and I mean ALL DAY. It didn’t storm, but it drizzled in some parts, poured in others. I had my wipers on the entire six-hour drive to Chicago, and as I arrived at Laurie’s apartment building, it began to rain as hard as it had the whole day. Perfect: All my stuff is going to get soaked.

Like most Chicago apartment buildings, you moved in in the back at Laurie’s building, so I pulled into the alley to the side close to the back staircase and turned on my flashers. Laurie came down to help.

Our procedure was to prop open the gate from the alley and the door to the back staircase, so we could run from the car to the staircase. We put the boxes down on Laurie’s landing landing, then raced back to the car, popped open the trunk just long enough to grab something else, slammed it shut and raced again to the staircase. Everything survived.

By this time, I had become familiar with the game of trying to find parking close to Laurie’s apartment building and the frustration of ending up a quarter-mile away by the park next to the nearby high school. I ended up over by dare, as dey say in Chicahga, on moving day and raced back to Laurie’s apartment. My clothes didn’t survive as pristine as my boxes had in the rain. (And, yes, it still was LAURIE’S apartment, because I was freeloading until I got a job.)

When I got back, Laurie had prepared dinner for us in the living room. It consisted of a plate of sushi courtesy of our favorite (at the time) sushi place—Kamehachi—shrimp and champagne. For dessert, she had chocolate-covered strawberries.

Laurie lit candles, turned on the jazz station, and we toasted our new beginning. Although the dinner, mood and music were mere extensions of things we had done before in exactly the same spot, Laurie commented that although everything was familiar, it also felt totally different.

“That’s because I’m not leaving this time.”

As soon as I said it, Laurie realized that that was exactly the reason things felt different. They WERE different. That realization made us both aware of fears perhaps we had suppressed about the step we had just taken. But neither one of us had any regrets.

And here we are eight years later. Apparently, things worked out.