Not Every Day Is a Good Day

Even I would admit, not every day is destined to be a great day. We make the best of it, move on and wake up to the next one, which would undoubtedly be better.

And so it was, I woke up one day in 1997 like it was any other day. I had only recently moved to Bucktown, a neighborhood that at the time was “up and coming” in Chicago. I was living on the corner of Webster and Damen; and I was the only tenant in a two-building business that was connected by a staircase with glass windows running the entire vertical height of the three-story structure. I loved being the only tenant. I could play my music as loud as I wanted without a care that the neighbors would report me.

I walked down the stairs, still a little groggy, opening the door onto Webster Ave, to find a scene that I could quite comprehend upon first look. My car was perpendicular to the street, the victim to an obvious hit and run. Walking around the car in disbelief, the front drivers side was smashed and the hood askew from the body of the vehicle, glass particles from the headlights all over the sidewalk. With my bedroom window facing Webster, I couldn’t figure out how I would not have heard a sound to match the impact of one car hitting another so hard that it moved the second car into the position where it was perpendicular to the street.

To add insult to injury, a nice $250 ticket was affixed to the driver’s side window for illegal parking.

I don’t remember what happened the rest of that day, but even I wanted to get this one over with.