Yet the house drew me in. There was a fireplace, not working but salvageable. No one had painted most of the wood inside, including paneling in the hall. Its beauty was faded but not destroyed, and even the textures of its decay were appealing, like the irregular painted flooring of the small back porch. Every few days I’d check the asking price online, and watch it dip by a few thousand dollars each month as the bank that had foreclosed on it grew more realistic. Half a year after I first noticed it being advertised, it finally fell to where I could afford it. The mortgage, insurance, and taxes all together would be about eight hundred bucks a month, about half of the rent for my Chicago place and considerably less than I used to pay in Washington for a basement studio apartment accessible by a door facing an alley behind U Street.
This house had good bones, as they say, and just needed a little work. Specifically, rebuilding the porch, tuck-pointing the chimneys, and replacing the broken pipes and collapsed floor in the bathroom. And then there was the rotted wooden framework holding up the third-floor balcony, and the small columns, and the bases of the big columns, and the wiring, and everything in the basement, which had flooded at some point during its vacant period, and the termite-ridden baseboards, and the unmoored light fixture dangling only by an electrical cord. . . . Friends kept asking me if I had seen the film The Money Pit.
It will never truly be finished, but we’ve got it looking good now. It’s home. From the porch I can see the lights of Memorial Hospital and the Chase Tower downtown, across the swift and steady river embanked alongside our street. The Tribune now in hand, I step back off the porch into the hall, stuff the paper into my briefcase, fold a suit over one arm, sling a gym bag over my shoulder, and try not to close the back door too loudly. I pull the back gate shut, step onto the concrete slab in the alley, and begin scraping the windshield of the Jeep. At 5:50, it is totally dark. But by now both Joe and Tim have taken leave of their wives and children and are also headed toward the gym. They’ll be ready to go at 6:00 sharp, and so will I.
The Jeep warms up quickly. It’s more car than I need, but the brutal winter of 2013, along with a transmission problem, motivated me to part ways with the old light green Taurus I’d bought when I moved home, known to interns and staff members as “the Chick Magnet.” The Jeep is better for transporting a bike, a visiting reporter, or a small contingent of staff. Its interior enjoyed fifteen minutes of fame when Mark Zuckerberg visited South Bend for a mayoral tour and decided to go live from an iPhone mounted by suction cup to the dashboard, inviting in hundreds of thousands of viewers. And, crucially, it has seat warmers.
The Jeep and I are nearly alone on the small bridge over the St. Joseph River, pulling up to a roundabout with WELCOME TO SOUTH BEND spread across it in big, illuminated white letters. This roundabout, and a second one afterward, are not the most popular thing I’ve done, but they’ve improved traffic flow and the look and feel of our entrance to downtown. Through the second one and down Main Street, I turn onto the cross street and pull into a parking garage. I drop my suit and car keys off in the locker and put on a hat and gloves. Tim will be waiting in the lobby of the gym, a carpeted area with a big-screen TV where retirees sip coffee before or after their lengthy morning fitness routines, while young professionals and working mothers stride purposefully across the carpeted floor toward the aerobics classroom or the weight and treadmill area upstairs.
Tim is a lawyer, formerly an accountant, taller and slightly older than me. Raised in Argos, about forty-five minutes south of here in Marshall County, he is judicious and conservative both politically and personally. The day I came out, via an op-ed that hit early in the morning, he was one of the first to text me something encouraging. Partly this was because he is a good friend and the kind of person to make sure to reach out. But it was also partly because his farm family upbringing never left him, which means he gets up ridiculously early, and so was among the first to read the paper that day.
Joe, by contrast, is nearly ten years younger than I am, a college track team miler who had interned in my office during my first summer as mayor. He was one of a handful who had humored me by joining the early Wednesday morning outdoor workouts that I organized that summer for staff and interns, during a particularly zealous and short-lived CrossFit phase. We’d go up to the track by the former Saint Joe High School and flip two-hundred-pound tractor tires that had been left there in the grass by the football team, do sets of push-ups between laps around the track, heave bags of water softener salt, and swing sledgehammers, that sort of thing. The interns called it CrossPete. That regimen didn’t outlast the summer. But Joe and I kept in touch, and he took up running with Tim and me after he finished college in Fort Wayne and moved home.
One reason we get along so well is the three of us don’t talk too much. Chatting is optional, depending on collective mood and energy level. A companionable silence governs the first few minutes as our trio gathers by the mouth of the parking garage in our sweats and hoodies and we trot, still in darkness, east on Jefferson across the two lanes (formerly four lanes) of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard (formerly Saint Joseph Street) and across the parking lot of the Century Center toward the sweep of the river.
From the Jefferson Boulevard Bridge, you can see the man-made rapids in the river and the River Lights, a permanent legacy of our 2015 anniversary celebrations. We raised over $700,000 to have an artist install a dynamic light feature to illuminate the cascades of the river in sweeping and shifting colors. Rob Shakespeare and his wife, Marie, moved to South Bend and spent three months in town perfecting the design. The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 153 volunteered the labor to set up the lights, some of which had to be mounted under the arches of the bridge. Like all good public art, the “Bean” in Chicago being the best example nearby, it has a charismatic quality that invites people to come up close to it, and to mix with others not like them. On summer evenings you will see clusters of people, clearly from different neighborhoods and lifestyles, walking in the park overlooking the cascades among lighted towers that respond to motion with patterns matching the lights on the water below. The colors of the light sculpture make up a universal language; very different faces light up in the same way, responding to its hues, when it surprises them with a burst of gold or pink. At this hour, no one is in the park to take in its kaleidoscopic glow, but we are treated to the red, then blue, lights striking the mist from the cascade and the fog from the comparatively warm river in the cold air, as we continue east toward Howard Park.
Careful not to slip on some remaining clumps of snow, we run on tiptoe down the concrete stairs connecting Jefferson above to the park below. The stairs bring us to a river walk, leading to a path originally built by the WPA during the Great Depression. Farther downstream the river roils with eddies and whirlpools, but here above the cascade it is wide and slow, almost glassy in the morning dark.
Monday is for long slow runs. The ideal running week (not that I claim that this happens often, but you have to work from an ideal) involves a long slow run on Monday, an interval workout at the track Wednesday, and a fast-tempo run on Thursday or Friday. Depending on the month, and the year, and things like whether one of us has a new baby or a pressing deadline these days, the Monday run is five, seven, or nine miles. To show you more glimpses of the city, we’ll say that today’s run will be all nine, a full figure eight.2
TWILIGHT TECHNICALLY HAS THREE PHASES, each brighter than the last: astronomical, nautical, and civil. The vague and doubtful suggestion of blue now must be somewhere between astronomical and nautical, as we round a succession of curves on the riverbank beginning with the path by the boathouse, where squads of lean rowers from Notre Dame will appear in a few months when it gets warmer, walking from the building down to the dock holding the sleek boat over their heads.