Chilean Chronicles, Part 104: Returning Home to Chicago

We're in the air from Toronto to Chicago.

We've left Santiago, site of fulfilled dreams, 80 degree Christmas Days, our impossibly dusty postage stamp of an apartment, and the consumption of more pisco sours and glasses, well, bottles, of red wine than we could have ever imagined, and are heading back to the Windy City that has been our home since 2002.

With grins that stretched beyond our ears, Dunreith and I deposited the check from the house sale we completed the day before we left on our Chilean adventure.

It far exceeded our greatest expectations.

We had the great privilege of being in Chile as the nation confronted, more directly than ever before, the still raw wounds from the Pinochet coup that happened on September 11, 1973.

We attended vigils and memorials events and plays and conferences and documentary films and panels and book launches, all of which were dedicated to grappling with the enduring impact of the overthrow of democratically-elected Salvador Allende and the brutal aftermath.

I've lived in the United States close to 50 years, but never before had I witnessed the concentrated and unified focusing on a single event in our nation's history the way Chileans from Arica in the north to Punta Arenas at the end of the world turned their attention to the coup.

In October we witnessed the jubilant eruption of emotion issuing forth from Chileans who hugged, kissed, screamed and honked their horns when their beloved soccer team punched its ticket to the world's largest sport event, to be held next June in Brazil.

In November we went to election events and talked to voters of all persuasions and ages and sides of the political spectrum during what turned out to be the first of two rounds in the presidential elections.

And in December we traveled to Torres del Paine, a national park of unsurpassed and staggering beauty that recently was named the eighth wonder of the world, when Michelle Bachelet made history in becoming the first candidate ever to be elected president twice in the post-democracy era.

Beyond these momentous months in Chilean history, we received an enormously generous reception from Chileans with whom we had some connection-we met everyone from dear friend Marjorie Agosin's seemingly inexhaustible supply of cousins and former students to a female anesthetist Dad had helped train nearly 30 years ago to our colleague, friend of a friend, guide/secret weapon Alejandra Matus-and those whom we had the good fortune to meet through our travels.

My Data Journalism students at the University of Diego Portales gradually understood my Spanish, my teaching methods and the concepts and application of this type of journalism in a process that left both sides feeling enriched for the encounter.

My research into the landmark 2009 Transparency Act, after an initial shift in focus, led me to talk with journalists, lawyers, non-profit executives, government representatives and plain folks in a project that gave me a sharper sense of the law's as yet incompletely realized potential.

Dunreith and I traveled to the vineyards of the Central Valley, to the coast cities of Valparaiso and Vina del Mar. With Aidan we flew to the searing desert of San Pedro de Atacama, the world's driest such space, and to Patagonia, a place Dunreith had longed to visit for years.

We also ventured to Rio, where I had the honor of attending, teaching and presenting to colleagues at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference doing investigative work, often at great physical peril, throughout the world.

We flew to Buenos Aires, where we met Dad and Lee before they set off on a two-week tour to Southern Argetina and up through Chile, and strolled together down elegant, inordinately wide, European-style boulevards, ate ice cream at Cafe Tortoni, the continent's oldest cafe that oozes with swagger, listened and learned for three hours at ESMA, the largest of the Argentine dictator's network of detention centers, and feasted on the sights and food of El Ateneo, the former theater that has been converted into one of the world's most spectacular bookstores.

Jon and I had the tremendous fortune to receive a grant from the Pulitzer Center to do a project about the impact of the past on the present in Chile 40 years after the coup. Together we worked long hours over the course of two weeks for a three-part series that ran on The New Yorker's Photo Booth and on Hoy's website.

The family visits over our final six weeks in the country helped confirm to me the possibility of weaving together the people and passions and dreams and values that I hold most dear. Perhaps, greatest of all, it's fortified my increasing conviction that this way of living was not only possible, but could in a very real sense become ordinary.

Now, we are returning to Chicago, the city from which we have left, where we raised Aidan from a boy to a man, and where we have spent the vast majority of our married life.

I am, and will always be, a Bostonian at my core.

I had too many seminal events, from the Blizzard of 78 to the 1975 World Series to growing up amidst that inimitable accent for it to ever be otherwise.

But if Boston in my heart, Chicago's in my guts.

The people's straightforward manner and generous spirit, the city's sense of itself as a place of story and legend, the passion that Chicagoans bring to their sports and their politics and their brats and their neighborhoods, its industrial past and tortured history with race and segregation and immigration and labor that make it what the late, great Studs Terkel called "the true American city", have all gotten in deep, and are not going anywhere, either.

I'll miss our life in Santiago and our travels throughout the country and continent, to be sure.

And I'm excited to fly over the leafless trees toward the dirtied snow and land at O'Hare, to walk in the 20 degree weather and see our breath and our circle of friends and family again, and to bring a fresh, broader perspective to my ongoing love for the city.

We don't know our exact next steps, or, frankly, where we're going to live after we stay at my brother Jon's place on the South Side.

But we do know without any shred of a doubt that, as always, the adventure will continue.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 89: October Behind, November Ahead

Our journey just keeps expanding.

If September was about an unprecedented eruption of memory on the fortieth anniversary of the Pinochet coup followed by a week-long celebration of the nation's independence, October was marked by journeys to countries and places we had never been.

We flew first to Rio for the Global Investigative Journalism Conference.

Traveling to Brazil was by itself a remarkable experience, and what struck me even more was being in a community of 1,300 investigative journalists from 90 countries around the planet.

It was like a wedding in which all of the guests loved to dig dirt on public officials, Four days of conversations begun and interrupted, but no one took offense.

Though these interactions I met colleagues whose work in countries where, as opposed to the United States, there are no laws requiring authorities to produce the information they request.

Journalists whose work in revealing the truth about what is happening are met with threats or blackmail.

Like a female journalist from Azerbaijan whose revelations of malfeasance by the president's family prompted authorities to plant a hidden camera in her bedroom and record her intimate moments with her boyfriend.

Or a young woman from Iraq who conceals her identity to preserve her safety.

Or a new friend from Brazil who traveled up and down the nation's borders to expose the trafficking and abuse of children.

Their dedication and courage and resilience moved and inspired me.

I returned from Rio to teach, but Dunreith continued to Brasilia, where she spent rich and relaxing days with her former student Veronica and her family.

A week later, we flew to Buenos Aires with its wide tree-lined boulevards and European-influenced elegance to meet Dad and Lee before they embarked on a 17-day tour that will take them down to the continent's southernmost point and around into Chile.

We saw the groups of mothers who have marched since the beginning of Argentina's Dirty War, waging a ceaseless struggle to learn the whereabouts of their disappeared children and husbands and brothers and sister, calling over and over again for those who ordered and carried out these heinous actions to be brought to justice.

We visited the detention center at ESMA, the former naval school, the largest of the country's network of hundreds of sites where Argentines were tortured and killed.

About 5,000 detainees entered ESMA.

Only 200 survived.

But we also visited Cafe Tortoni, the continent's oldest cafe that oozed with Old World charm and swagger, a place where poets and artists and writers and dancers and plain folk have come for more than a century and a half.

We had lunch at El Ateneo, the former theater turned bookstore that in 2008 was named one of the world's most beautiful bookstores.

We had a parillada, a plate of all kinds of meat, with Colombian friend and fearless journalist Jenny Manrique in the Palermo Hollywood neighborhood. The plate was filled so high with ribs and chicken and sausage that a friend of Facebook deadpanned that she gained five pounds just by looking at it.

I visited and learned from the folks at La Nacion, the country's second-largest newspaper and a place where the data team is showing remarkable persistence and creativity in accessing, cleaning and displaying data online and in the newspaper.

All of us soaked in the energy and openness and generosity of the Argentine people we met and whose eyes showed their pleasure when we told them how excited we were to be in their country.

We also traveled to Colonia, Uruguay, a town of just 25,000 a ferry ride and a country away from Buenos Aires. Together we strolled along the cobble-stoned streets in the community that alternated between Portuguese and Spanish control nine times during the years 1680 to 1825, when the nation won its independence from Spain.

We spoke with our tour guide Maria, a woman with short, pulled-back brown hair and a blue pants suit, about why Uruguayans twice had voted against reversing a law that granted amnesty to the leaders who ruled the country during the dictatorship from 1973 to 1985.

There was a war, she said. People did bad things on both sides.

And, at the end of the month, Jon and I learned that our application to gain funding to use the upcoming elections here in Chile to explore the degree to which the country's past lives in the present had been accepted.

Each of these experiences, each of these journeys to places which for years had only been places on a map and not somewhere that we would actually visit, has meant something.

Each conversation and encounter with someone with whom I have a shared passion for story and uncovering and sharing truth, has mattered.

They've mattered because they've contributed to a continually widening and deepening yet also shrinking sense of the world and of the interconnection of people who come from different backgrounds and cultures and classes and races and languages, but who share values and commitments and beliefs.

October's behind us.

November begins today.

I'm optimistic that the expansion will continue.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 85: Cafe Tortoni and Really Living

When I was growing up and Dad was feeling deep-down good, he’d rear back, slap his right knee and exclaim, “Yee-hah, this is really living!” I felt Dad’s words tonight as he, Dunreith, Lee and I were deciding on the evening’s activities here in Buenos Aires.

Our choices were between going to Café Tortoni, the oldest café in Latin America, spending time in El Ateneo, one of the world’s greatest bookstores, or taking in one of the planet’s most intimate and passionate dance forms, the tango.

This was truly a no-lose situation.

As she has done time and again during the 15 years of our relationship, Dunreith steered me and us in the right direction.

Based on Lee’s stated goal of having ice cream for dinner and her own intention of taking in a classic café, she cast the decisive vote for us to go to Tortoni.

By this point we had already had a full and fantastic day rich in conversation and laughter and language and friendship and connection.

We had spent about an hour in a travel agency with Rosi, a Brazilian widow with long, black hair, an easy smile and an efficient manner who has been married to her second older Argentine husband for the past nine years.

We had had our first parillada, a heaping pile of all kinds of beef and chicken and sausage with Jenny Manrique, a Colombian journalist and friend from the Dart/Ochberg community who has been living in Buenos Aires for more than a year.

Jenny chose Las Cabras, a loud and inviting restaurant in the Palermo neighborhood with low-set red chairs and a seemingly endless supply of meat, to meet us.

Together we wiled away a good chunk of the afternoon, switching back and forth between English and Spanish while Dunreith entertained us with drawing on the paper tablecloth. (Among others, I had the words, “Jeff”, “marido”, “hombre”, “funny” and “broma” directed at me.) After all the eating, we didn’t need much more food for the evening.

Dunreith’s suggestion moved us toward the single place in Buenos Aires that friend and Chilean guide Alejandra Matus said we couldn’t miss.

A short cab ride later, we were outside the fabled establishment.

It didn’t disappoint.

Everything about “Tortoni,” as the tuxedo-wearing waiters called it, oozed class, Old World charm and Argentine swagger.

The high ceilings, much of which is covered with the original stain glass from when the café opened in 1858.

The circular marble tables.

The combination of artwork, artifacts like spoons, photographs and tributes to the place that lined the walls and filled the cabinets that were in nooks and crannies all over the place. The dark wood that framed the main room and the circular burgundy pillars that held it up.

The busts of legendary authors Jorge Luis Borges and Luigi Pirandello.

The coner table that is permanently occupied by wax statues of Borges, "King of Tango" singer/songwriter Carlos Gardel and poet Alfonsina Storni.

The bustle of the wait staff and the unhurried way they waited for us to work our way through our decision about what to drink and eat.

The pleased, but unsurprised smile on the lips of the stocky man with a purple tie and thick mustache who stood near the entrance to the tango room when I told him what Alejandra had said.

The intimate and utterly absorbed conversations between well-turned out friends and family.

Dunreith and Lee each ordered dulce de leche ice cream, along with vanilla and chocolate ice cream, respectively. Both of them and Dad had a decaf cortado.

We all sat and talked and marveled at our fortune at being alive and with each other.

I didn’t slap my knee and called out as Dad used to do when Mike, Jon and I were young.

But I did reflect how the past few 18 months have been filled with one expansive and dream fulfilling experience after the next.

Together Dunreith and I have both moved forward together into uncharted territory and back into sharing and weaving with our existing community and family what we have learned and seen.

That process has only accelerated since Dunreith and I boarded a plane in mid-July and flew to Santiago.

We have tickets to fly home to Chicago two months from today.

Plenty more adventures await before then.

Uruguay tomorrow morning.

Tango or El Ateneo tomorrow night.

We’re really living.