We checked into the Palmer House Hilton in Chicago for a four-day weekend. Greg’s travel schedule and the whole jetsetter thing have their disadvantages, but then there are possibilities like this and you forget the bad stuff. It’s just for fun, based on finding a couple bargains on the airfare and hotel and on knowing that the weather will start to make things like this less pleasant for a while.

You can’t believe this place. I mean,… you really just can’t. This is the Old Money as Old Money doesn’t get to be anymore. You don’t get to build the ceilings this high anymore or do quite that much carving. Even now, there’s a part of me that is a little uncomfortable with it — Church Lady Gracie who says that you can’t get away with something like this unless you’re building something with a saint’s name in the title.

But it’s a cathedral all the same. No mistaking it. I don’t know when it was built exactly, but when you walk into the lobby, you go into a cathedral to American possibility, munificence, capitalism … you name it. And it presided over those days and lasted into these ones as well, which I find admirable. (Fans of musicals might remember that in The Music Man, when Harold Hill first arrives in River City. he asks a local what’s a good hotel to stay in and the local, after looking him up and down, grumpily replies, “The Palmer House in Chicagah?”) When we checked in, they gave us brownies with an attached card that said that the gift was in homage to the fact that Bertha Palmer’s chef had introduced the brownie at Chicago’s 1893 World’s Fair.

But that puts me in mind of the book “The Devil in the White City,” and I suppose that’s something I was trying not to think of, since I found it a very unsettling read. It’s an account based on two true stories going on side-by-side in Chicago: the building of an entire magnificent White City for the 1893 World’s Fair and the predation of a particularly evil serial killer who took lives without exacting undue physical pain, without non-consensual sex or torture playing a part, which makes it all the more inexplicable and horrifying. It’s bizarre to play the two stories off against each other — the unbelievable accomplishment of one, the unfathomable inhumanity of the other — but maybe there’s a little real truth about the nature of cities and behavior hidden in there. There’s so much strength possible, but there’s also a kind of insanity in the air, it seems to me. Not everyone takes to killing, but there are things that seem possible in these big cities that just don’t seem possible away from them. That could be harnessed in good ways, I’m thinking, or it could be fought against. But it’s something I can’t seem to forget when I’m here.