You Can't Go Home Again

Of course you can go home again. It's just that it will make you feel like shit.

Just back from Chicago and a family wedding. Took Owen on the Chicago Architectural Society Boat Tour--as fabulous, with views as breath-taking and guide as witty and knowledgeable as I remembered--except that most of the buildings that dominate the river tour rose up long after I left the city. Damn. Nothing like a couple of spectacular skyscrapers to make you feel your age.

Then we were on the El. And as soon as we boarded, a young woman popped up and gestured to her seat. Poor child. Raised well, she was just doing as she'd been taught, offering up her seat to elderly passengers. Except that said elderly--Keith and I-- were horrified.

The trauma of Lutz's brought the message home. I was first introduced to Lutz's by my beloved Gram V. It was quite a trek from the suburbs, driving in on the tollway and down crowded Montrose Avenue, but well worth it: this little slice of Vienna, transported to the Midwest. A plush dining area that evoked the parlor of the early 20th-century bourgoisie, cakes so rich and ornate that you felt they'd have satisfied even Mozart, coffee served in fancy little pots with real whipped cream on the side, buxom waitresses with their hair in buns and pronounced German accents, and--an essential part of every visit--the most elaborate women's restroom I have ever encountered. When I grew up enough to live in Chicago, my roommate and I would regularly set aside several hours for a trip to Lutz's: a walk to the bus stop, a long bus ride, a walk to another bus stop, another long bus ride. . . but all worth it. One memorable day, we stayed in the Lutz's patio garden for several hours, consuming several slices of cake and plates of cookies and quaffing countless pots of whipped-cream-laced coffee in the process. Amazing we didn't launch ourselves into a diabetic coma then and there.

So when Keith and I married in my mother's backyard in the western suburbs of Chicago, of course Lutz's cakes bedecked the festivities. And of course I dragged Keith and Owen to Lutz's this trip. Except all was changed. Shrunken. Literally shrunken--the dining area halved, stripped of its plushness, just a set of utilitarian diner chairs and tables on linoleum; the wait staff now a couple of adolescent girls; and, horrors, no women's restrooms, just a single unisex toilet. And the cakes? Fine, but not fabulous. "It's ok," shrugged Owen. OK. A part of me died inside. Lutz's was never "ok."

So, yes, you can go home again. But maybe you shouldn't.