Ms.+H.+poem

(Couplets are supposed to be single-spaced... Wiki wouldn't let me!)     O’Hare, 1975   The summer I turned 15, the blue lights lining the runways and luring the jets to O’Hare lured us in, too.

 We’d pile into Bobby’s Ford and drive out past the town line, following the fence that separated cars

 from planes. Entering Terminal 2 in a gangly cluster, our swagger masked our awe as we discovered

 a portal to the wider world – a world we knew was round, contained, conquered, but one we still believed

 stretched out flat forever. Pilots in sharp blue caps strode by— so cosmopolitan. Swarms of families

 from Eastern lands filled the concourse with beards and caftans, cinnamon saris, intangible words,

 the children’s dark eyes meeting ours with an equal measure of wonder that they had arrived in this

<span style="display: block; line-height: 1.2em; margin: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: initial; padding: 0px;"> new world and that we were there to see it –- five suburban kids, all awkward in our cut-offs and tees.

<span style="display: block; line-height: 1.2em; margin: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: initial; padding: 0px;"> Still goosey and anxious, we’d pull the car over on Touhy at the spot where the gray runway ended,

<span style="display: block; line-height: 1.2em; margin: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: initial; padding: 0px;"> then lay out across the warm hood to wait. Soon lights would turn to face us from far down the strip,

<span style="display: block; line-height: 1.2em; margin: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: initial; padding: 0px;"> and we’d brace ourselves for the rumble, clenching hands, all giddy and giggling as it neared,

<span style="display: block; line-height: 1.2em; margin: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: initial; padding: 0px;"> engines notching up to shrill whine, then hold our breaths as the nose lifted just in time to clear

<span style="display: block; line-height: 1.2em; margin: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: initial; padding: 0px;"> the fence, the car, and us, and then scream till we burst as the vast underbelly roared overhead

<span style="display: block; line-height: 1.2em; margin: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: initial; padding: 0px;"> and was gone – the suck of hot wind leaving us naked and breathless in a world that had opened up

<span style="display: block; line-height: 1.2em; margin: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: initial; padding: 0px;"> just for us, the jet stream taking tiny flecks of us with it  to exotic lands we knew we would never know.