I met Larry Fisher, getting off the Green Line last week. Our sons played youth baseball together back in the 20th century. We shared the stands at Lindberg Park during PONY league games.
Hadn’t seen him for 15 years, then ran into him at Day in Our Village in June, an event where you can learn more about Oak Park in one afternoon than anyplace else. I’m always amazed by how many people come from out of town to this thing — as if they were shopping for a hometown.
Three months later, we meet again. The Fishers (his wife, Val, was a longtime District 200 school board member) still live in the village. This is the kind of place where, sooner or later, you’re likely to run into people you know. Just before we parted, he asked, “How is Oak Park doing?” then suggested I write a column about it.
Friday night, I attended a lecture at Unity Temple by Michael Dowd, a visiting Unitarian minister who preaches “Religious Naturalism,” which contends there is no conflict between religion and science. “Ecology is the new theology,” he said to a crowd of over 100, including out-of-town participants in the Climate March, who were being hosted by members of the congregation. Climate change is the ultimate moral issue of our age, according to Dowd.
“Our present course leads to certain catastrophe,” he said, yet our political situation makes it impossible for us to change that course.
“We are stuck between the impossible and the unthinkable.” So what do we do?
“It’s everyone’s job to make the impossible possible,” he said.
Making the impossible possible — sounds like a good village slogan.
On Saturday, the weather was just too beautiful to stay indoors. I walked to Mills Park, which was renewed and refreshed recently, along with the rest of Oak Park’s parks. I stopped at various points, as I often do these days during my walks, and admired how the setting sun highlights the upper reaches of our urban forest. Rambling through this most walkable of villages allows me not only to go outside, but more and more, to get outside my head.
In Mills Park I came across the first cricket match in Oak Park history (well, the first I’d seen anyway). An expatriate Englishman who lives in Oak Park, assembled a group of friends — adults and kids — to experience one of baseball’s precursors. How cosmopolitan we have become, it seems, with multiple languages heard regularly on our streets and now, cricket.
Downtown was crowded and busy, as it is most weekend evenings. We are becoming, more and more, a nightlife hub.
Yet on Sunday, I heard out my window a cheery “Good morning!” called at some distance, judging by the volume. And suddenly Oak Park felt like a village again. There are times when we act like a city and times when we act like a village. Our well-being may hinge on our ability to maintain the balance between the two.
I attended services at the two extremes of Sunday welcoming: The Unitarian-Universalists (their slogan is “Come as you are”) and the Catholics (whose slogan could be “Come as we’d like you to be”). The Unitarians talked about taking the path of risk and the choir sang a spirited, multilayered Swahili anthem, accompanied by seven drummers drumming (djembes to be precise). Meanwhile, St. Catherine-St Lucy Church, which I haven’t attended since the age of 6, welcomed back Sr. Teresita Weind, exiled in the early 1990s for not accepting her womanly place (in other words, second). Teresita is now the head of her order and lives in Rome and is even more widely respected than she was when she was leading services at St. Kate’s, but on this homecoming Sunday, she preached, humbly and eloquently, about the long road to reconciliation. The Archdiocese didn’t like her sermons 23 years ago. Now they should hire her to teach the men how to do it. She would never say something so snarky, of course. Instead, she encourages patience and perseverance because reconciliation takes as long as it takes. But in the end it’s worth the effort because God’s gift to us is a deeper peace, which she sang about. She is a living, breathing psalm and spiritual balm. Wonder why the higher-ups couldn’t see it.
That afternoon, a number of us gathered to help one our fellow employees here at Wednesday Journal. He and his family were forced from their home in the middle of the night recently by a terrible fire next door. Much was damaged or destroyed and they had this one day to pack the remainders and move to temporary storage and lodging. A terrible disruption and dislocation. So the call went out and helping hands appeared. But they still have a long road ahead.
We are a community where you can walk everywhere and meet people you know. We are a place that refreshes its parks, not just its computers. Our urban forest is sunlit, soothing and sheltering. This is a town other people fantasize calling home, a great place to be from, return to, or just visit, judging by all the visitors — and all the businesses, complaining every step of the way about how awful we are but which keep applying to open here. Self-bashing boosters. Nobody comes here to be trendy, which makes us the epitome of anti-cool. We take the path of risk. We face the biggest moral issues of the day and work to make the impossible possible. And we welcome those who come here to remind us to keep doing so. We are cosmopolitan townies, an urban village, where Unitarian choirs sing Swahili anthems and Catholics never give up on the promise of reconciliation. We’re not too sophisticated to shout out a cheery good morning and not afraid to organize a game of cricket in the park. And when people need help, we practice call and response. But there is a long road ahead for all of us.
And we have people who have been here for 30 years who are awake and care enough to ask, “How is Oak Park doing?”
What a good question.
So how are we doing?
