Fidgety

Fidget:  To move about restlessly, nervously or impatiently.  (Dictionary.com Unabridged.  Source location, Random House, Inc.)

When I lived in Chicago I went to Lincoln Park Zoo a couple times a year.  I'd wander past the gorillas, elephants and kangaroos, watching the animals watch the people watch them.  Usually I ended up in the big cat house, with the tigers, jaguars and lions.


The territories of Siberian tigers can be as large as 4000 square miles.  They have been known to travel as much as 650 miles over the course of just a few days.  Typical territory size for African lions is up to 300 square miles.  Cheetahs range an average territory of 120 square miles.  Depending on the area in which a jaguar lives, its territory can be from five square miles up to more than 100 miles.


Yet here were these cats, in glass-fronted lairs not much bigger than the living room at my house.  They had access to slightly larger outdoor accommodations, of course, but many times when I was there they were in the cages.  They looked placid, even bored.  But they paced.  Incessantly.  As if they knew the enclosures weren't really strong enough to hold them, and were mulling over various plans for dramatic escapes.


Anyone observing me would notice that my natural demeanor is one of calm.  I'm laid back.  Kind of quiet.  Maybe even a little bit aloof at times.  I am patient.  I can spend hours absorbed in tedious tasks that others would quickly abandon out of boredom and frustration.


Inside, I'm a lot like those big cats at the zoo.  Restless.  Calculating.  Plotting my escape, my next big more.


All during the 1990's, while I lived in Chicago, I spent every spare moment scouring the length and breadth of the city.  On foot, I meandered through the neighborhoods, soaking in the architecture and observing the people.  I walked for hours in every type up weather, stopping once in a while to window-shop or refresh myself at a cafe.


I drove, too, expanding my range in ever-widening circles.  In the old green Buick Skylark, the two-tone gray Blazer, and later the Jeep, I made countless trips up and down Lake Shore Drive; all around the Loop; out through the blighted, then gentrified West Side; north to Rogers Park, Evanston, and on up Route 41 into Wisconsin; south through Bronzeville, Kenwood, Hyde Park, South Shore and the Stony Island corridor; east into northwest Indiana or southwest Michigan.


And I moved.  I had dreamed about living in Chicago since I was in grade school.  Once I became an actual resident of the city, I was determined to sample life in as many neighborhoods as I could.  I started out in Rogers Park, near the Stack and Steaks at Clark and Devon.  Moved with a roommate to her mom's condo on Lake Shore Drive in Wrigleyville while her mom was between 'real' tenants.  Shared an apartment on Ainslie in Lincoln Square with one of the groomers who worked for me at the pet supply boutique I co-owned.  Lived in a tiny basement studio just off Dearborn in the Gold Coast, to be closer to the shop.  Found a bigger place a few blocks away, on the third floor of a Victorian rowhouse in Old Town.  From there I moved to East Rogers Park, so I could live across the street from Lake Michigan without having to pay an arm and a leg in rent.


I made those six moves, plus a few short hops, between January, 1991 and February of 1995.  In those days, all my possessions fit into the back seat and trunk of my Buick.  I didn't own anything I couldn't lift and/or carry up and down stairs by myself.


A year later, I moved in at my best friend's house on the South Side for what was supposed to be a couple months.  A couple months turned into six years.  My time there still holds the record for the longest I've spent at one address in my adult life.


I don't think I was aware at the time, but I used the moving was a way to shake things up, to keep things interesting when I felt too hemmed in by circumstances or city life.  Living in different places satisfied my curiosity about what life was like over there, and over there.  Moving my possessions from one place to another soothed my roving, gypsy soul in ways nothing else could at the time.


In the end, it wasn't enough.  The moving, the walking, the driving:  none of it was enough to keep me from feeling like those big cats at the zoo.