“Will you go to heaven? Answer these two questions and find out.” The words were painted on a piece of cardboard and taped to the front of a card table set up on the grass. A gray-haired man and woman sat on folding chairs behind it. I said hello. They did not respond, remaining motionless with frozen smiles. Had they answered the questions and were pleased with the results? It is comforting to think things are in our control.

I had a free day. I didn’t have a plan and wasn’t looking for one. I was free. I seized the day. I walked with step-by-step, breath-by-breath deliberation across the mammoth expanse of Chicago’s Grant Park. My felt moment-by-moment sensations—rich, textured, and intense—made the expanse of the park feel intimate. I mentally counted the seconds of my inhales. The seconds of my exhales. Someday my breathing will stop. Every second counts. Everything that happens happens right now. What was happening? Everything. How else to explain being alive?

My walking and breathing were my current state of affairs in life.

A windy day in the Windy City. A bracing baptismal breeze of cool moisturizing mist swept over me in vertical waves at irregular moments—refreshing on a muggy July day. I was a considerable distance from proud Buckingham Fountain, with its computerized dance of playing water jetties, but could still catch the humidifying drift as it suffused the air. Children near the fountain would squeal and run to avoid being captured by it. I watched the teasing approach and avoidance dance of the youngsters with delight. It was as if they had just discovered water—or the potentiality of it. Adults near the fountain stood still and quiet, as if they were asleep.

I stopped and let my small black backpack slowly slip along my arm to the ground and lowered myself down to the carpet of grass. I felt my body contact the earth.

I focused my attention on a tenor saxophone overplaying the eighties disco hit, “Don’t Leave Me This Way.” Amicably chatting people on the sidewalk with disengaged looks ignored the plea. An occasional explosion of laughter from a private joke would disrupt the moisturized air.

The intensity and clarity of the cloudless, cerulean sky domed the unrestrained cityscape. My eyes swept up and down from the intensity of the color overhead to the paling of it at the edging horizon line of Lake Michigan.

I fanned my hand across the recently sheered blades of lawn in front of me, and noted the dozens of shades of green making up the living carpet. Only my sweeping arm cast a shadow under the high noon sun.

As I looked up I saw two men approaching. They appeared to be zeroing in on me across the green lawn. Their poised bodily movements and confident eyes gave them away—self-assured, not self-effacing. They were making a stand as they walked. They traversed the ground with a commissioned compass that pointed to an empowering letter “T” “Truth.” I would not call it a natural cadence. It was an affected walk—shaped, influenced. Each man carried a single book.

The space between them and me shrank. I looked at them cautiously. They looked at me as if I was not one of them.

“Every person is the creation of himself,
the image of his own thinking and believing.
As individuals think and believe, so they are.”
— Claude Bristol (1891–1951)