I spent a couple of hours wandering around, getting a little walking exercise. I had already realized that I missed too much in New York and I didn't want to make the same mistake in Chicago. Watched a band playing on the other side of the canal, had a leisurely lunch, just taking everything in. But the travel bag was like a hustler magnet. Eventually, I decided to just stick close to Union Station.

Whereas I had been pleasantly surprised at how friendly everyone in New York had been, Chicago was more like what I had feared New York would be. There were hustlers everywhere. I coughed up a couple of bucks for the first two or three because I was feeling an inner need to help others in return for all the help I had been receiving.

"Think you could help me out? I just need a couple of bucks to catch the train to work."

But two hours later, they were still there, still pushing the same story. It didn't take me long to wise up -- or maybe become jaded.

Two significant events happened outside, though. One was when I called Joyce to make sure she knew my arrival time back in New Orleans (3:30 the next afternoon). Of course, she already knew that. She started talking about the Sears Tower (although it has a new name now) and how I should check it out, particularly since there were plexiglass viewing platforms on the top floor where you could seeming step out of the building.

I was looking right at it when she told me this. I could see the platforms. I've got this thing about heights, though, which I think is related to a drive through the mountains of West Virginia when I was about 9 or 10. Just looking UP at the Sears Tower gave me vertigo. No way in hell was I going up there to look down.

The other one involved a woman whom I encountered in the late afternoon. She was just sitting on a bench, like maybe she was waiting for someone or maybe waiting for her train to arrive. She was extremely attractive. So much so that I snapped a picture of her. She didn't see me taking the picture, but at the last second, she turned her head. In retrospect, this is probably a good thing or I would be disinclined to share the photo.

After I did this, I walked over to her and said, "Excuse me. I'm not hitting on you or anything. As soon as I tell you this I'm going to walk away and go back into the station and you'll never see me again. But, just in case no one has told you this lately, you are beautiful."

She beamed and said thank you. As promised, I walked away and didn't see her again. But I felt like I had done something nice, maybe boosted her spirit a little. At the same time, I was very aware how out of character this was for me. I just don't go around telling strange women that they are beautiful. I've been married too long for that kind of shit. But something inside me demanded a random act of kindness, aimed purely at simply trying to make someone smile. No ulterior motives, no expectation of a reward, just trying to spread my new-found happiness and contentment.

It was almost immediately after this encounter that I discovered that there was a special lounge area for Amtrak passengers with sleeping car reservations -- the Metropolitan Lounge. I was down to about 4 or 5 hours of wait time but this was a true pleasure to find out about. The first-class lounge has big comfy chairs instead of the rigid plastic ones in the rest of the waiting areas. Free soft drinks, juice and coffee. A computer to use to access e-mail or just surf the web for a while. Big-screen TVs. And a place to stash my travel bag for a while. I was wishing I had found it sooner.

Out in the rest of Union Station, there was a crowd mentality going on. Even grabbing a drink at the McDonald's in the station required an aggressive push-through-the-crowd approach that grated against my usual demeanor. Inside the lounge was a return to normalcy.

It made the rest of the wait much more tolerable and erased the low-level stress that I was feeling everywhere else. Daph had given me a crime novel to read. This was a good time to read it and relax.