The Things We Write About When We Write About Talking: out of towners

The greatest moment I've had as a Chicagoan came a few years ago. Now that I'm entering my twilight years I can reflect back on such trivialities (,she said, strutting about her office in too-high heels). I was living in Lincoln Park in what can only be described as a closet with my dear friend Alli. We had just painted an accent wall in the common space. It was supposed to be blue, but ended up being a deep purple. I told people we meant to do this: Purple out our room. We were very "hip" and "urban" then. Our bungalow sat just up the street from the Pritzker's new mega-mansion, and just down the way from Lincoln Park High School on Burling Avenue, off Armitage. We had arrived.

Alli and I moving on our last day together in front of the Purple Wall.

I was too poor and cheap to pay for a parking spot in our back lot then, so I'd taken to parking three blocks away across the street from an elementary school, thus successfully dodging getting ticketed or towed on the regular. Slowly, but surely I was on my way to becoming a neighborhood icon. Brigid: The girl who didn't get tickets. This last bit isn't true. I got one ticket eventually and no one ever nicknamed me. It'd be great if they had though. I wanted to look like I was part of the neighborhood. A real Chicago broad, if you will.

Anyway, I thought I looked young and cool, beating the system one day at a time. This can be cross-referenced with a piece of paper I found in an old book where I scribbled: Trick the system because it tricks me.

Side note: I didn't set our Internet up for three months, instead making a name for myself as the girl who drank coffee, applied for jobs and stole Internet from Borders on North Avenue. (I feel bad about this. Borders is now known for being the first national chain bookstore to go out of business by way of homeless using the bathroom and post-graduates reading books on the floor as if it were a library. (As if you didn't know this last part.))

Then add to all of this how awesome Alli and I looked taking to the road on our bicycles — her's was a sweet as pie blue road bike, and mine was the chunky Trek mountain bike my sister Colleen had ridden throughout junior high. I was clearly not the cooler between the pair of us. All this would change though, soon, little snail, soon. One glimmering Spring afternoon, the world saw me and Alli as we saw ourselves. It came in the form of a question.

We were walking to our "spot," a Chinese restaurant three blocks up Armitage from Halsted that we'd been to only one other time. I was wearing gym shorts which basically said, "No, I actually don't give a fuck," and Alli was wearing a nondescript shirt you get at things like orientation or camp. I am 98 percent sure we were skipping. And then it happened.

"Can you tell us how to get to DePaul?"

Freeze frame, mid-air-skip. Shock. Awe. More shock.

We had done it! We had finally shown the world we belonged. The bouncer finally let us in! We knew where things and stuff and places and apartments and the lake were located. And it had happened when we looked our most uncoolest. We were sloppy slobs, rollin' around in the sun on an early evening week night.

The honeymoon phase of our tenure as city dwelling direction givers goes on until this day. For me, it's in the Uptown neighborhood, and for Alli it's Manhattan. We've got it together, mastering one city after another sans map. It's a feeling I have come to love, feeling like I belong, but nothing compares to this first time when someone else decided I belonged too.