Chicago 1973

Because of my father's connections in the business world, we started meeting American families that were working in Europe for Caterpillar tractors. The company were my father was head CEO landed a major contract with them and so my father started traveling to the Midwest in the early seventies. As is usual in European culture, business deals are often sealed over a good meal, and my mother who was a good cook provided many a successful dinner for my father and his business connections. So, over time, the wives also came to dinner, the children sometimes met if they were our age, and so friendships were forged. Out of such an arrangement grew a friendship that lasted many years with an American couple from Joliet, Illinois. The husband was a high ranked Caterpillar engineer, and the wife and my mother became good friends. They had some friends in Illinois they thought would make a good match for me for a six week summer visit to introduce me to American culture first hand. The family had a daughter my age, sixteen, and a son about twelve. I was already intrigued from a young age by the possibility to study and live in the US, so I was happy with the idea. The first exposure to a big American city was Toronto, as my father had to meet some business people there and then I would spend time with my new family for six weeks, while my parents went on to take a trip down the Grand Canyon with Flemish-American friends of theirs from Detroit. The family I stayed with for six weeks was kind, very easy going, welcoming. I was a shy person at that age, and they accepted this gracefully. The biggest impact on me was visiting downtown Chicago with its huge skyscrapers and endless freeways system. The sheer abundance of cars, of people, the traffic, the towering buildings, was unlike anything I had experienced. I was of course familiar with Brussels, had traveled to London and Paris, but I could not have imagined a city like Chicago. Looking down from the hugely tall Sears Towers was a far different experience emotionally and intellectually than looking down from the top deck of Notre Dame in Paris. These were two completely different worlds, on steeped in the future, the other in the past. To experience this as a young girl, and comprehend the significance, only added to my fascination with history and man's drive to control his surroundings. My father once pointed out that you can tell what a civilization values most by which buildings are the tallest. In Europe for a very long time, the tallest buildings in town were the churches and cathedrals. These days that is no longer the case. Now the tallest buildings, like it was already so in Chicago forty years ago, are also tall business buildings, and it seems to be the norm in most big modern cities world wide. The experience atop the Sears Towers made me realize that as a young European, I was standing at a crossroads in my life story as I was considering leaving a spiritually oriented world for one that was business minded. The rapid and continued growth of America's big cities and the challenges and dilemmas and questions such a relentless pursuit have generated always take me back to my first experience in Chicago, that already then had left me excited but slightly uneasy and concerned.