An older cat in shiny gold cufflinks sits close up against a woman - his arm around her shoulder. She's a workingman's Nancy Wilson. Not as refined and subtle, but a similar smile, a similar natural grace. Cat is clean. Pink stripe shirt, big gold rings & hip blue shoes & he's singing to her, quietly, in her ear. He's singing and she's giggling - back of her hand at her lips while he lays his best Marvin Gaye on her. I imagine it must buzz and tickle in her ear, though she doesn't seem to mind. She's laughing, 'cause she has this man who sits next to her on a park bench in the summer evening and pitches romance with a song as though she's the only girl in the world.

Later, looking back from the cool greenish clear toward the land and summer trees, I spy a penthouse atop the red brick Hampton House Apartments, in the building where Mayor Washington lived. It's a perfect, modest, clean-lined penthouse - not always announcing itself, you know? - a place with quiet stature. Plants indicate a roof garden with big windows looking out. Though he never did, I've always imagined Saul Bellow living there in manly intellectual luxury - the wide view crow's nest on a rocky perch looking out over the trees, the city in the distance, his eagle inner eye focusing on the exchange of two sherry & cracker professors or horn-rimmed students as they discuss Hegel or Simone Weil and climb the rocks getting into the lake. My boyhood-self has always wanted a house like this.

Bellow lived in Hyde Park for years in a Dorchester Brownstone - I imagine he took his liquor at the Quad Club, Coffee at the Div School, got groceries at Mr. G's with his young, curly haired wife; one more Pulitzer-level genius-colossus casually sitting down to Thai food on 55rd Street.

There is another stunning blush of golden-red evening light over Chicago tonight, with fire-frosted clouds and the last jet vapor trails of the busy day. It is my favorite time. To the west, the trees diffuse the bronze light in leafy patterns and the old buildings of Hyde Park look as if covered in a soft wrap of restful blue smoke. To the east, there is almost a monochrome of water and darkening sky - no horizon at all. To the south is the tremendous rounded scoop of Lake Michigan shoreline where they built the blackened steel mills and red-and-white-smokestacked power stations of South Chicago and industrial Gary. But to the north is the gleaming tall sophistication of the American city ending the day, putting on hip evening clothes, fixing a six o'clock cocktail.

After the Great Fire, much of the new city was remade on landfill - on the burned, leveled wreckage of the old. They made something like twenty square miles of public parks on the new land and asked this designer-head Frederick Law Olmstead to come and design them with Daniel Burnham himself looking over his shoulder as one vast, contiguous, green idea. (He was a real macher, this one. He got the gigs doing Centraland Prospect Parks in New York, too. And the Boston Commons.)

So, From Hyde Park in the South to the mouth of the Chicago River, 8 miles of USDA Prime lakefront property was established - all of it open with fountains and trees for the good of Civilization. Behind it to the west rose a mighty behemoth: the cultural-industrial/social-economic capitol of the Midwest; a grand palace of architecture and a striding giant of The New Thing.

The city was hitting with idealism and optimism when they completed the job just before the turn of the last century. Can you imagine the get-back-up of those Chicagoans who faced the fire? Here's a roughened ward alderman in a meeting, chomping down on a cigar, "Let's see, the whole city is leveled for thirty square miles. Let's feed the wreckage to the lake, add acreage to the city and remake the shoreline." "Forever open, clear and free," says the charter. They were so proud when they were through, they invited everybody over to check it out. In fact, they held the biggest, most elaborate world's fair anyone had ever seen. And then, when that was through, and on that same site, Rockefeller built the University of Chicago, current home of boatloads of Nobel Laureates. If you swim out far enough from where I am now, you can just make out the top of the mammoth chapel tower.

A hundred & twenty years ago, they took some of the rubble leftovers and made "The Point" a fifteen-acre spit of land in Hyde Park where people rode horses or took carriage rides in grand style in the old days, wearing gloves, staying for a week in luxury at the Shoreland Hotel. Students play ultimate on the great lawn now. Huge families hold reunions in matching red tee shirts under the pine trees. Folks get married in a limestone field house with a round turret and picture windows. Everybody comes out here for Fourth of July, bringing grills and blankets and dogs and flags. Enough people bring electric radios and turn them up so we can all dig the symphony in Grant Park eight miles to the north, and watch the fireworks over our shining city.

And I swim in the cooling bright water after boiling through another summer day, and watch the twilight sky, like an island; loving the city, imagining myself a great artist some day, living in Saul Bellow's old imaginary penthouse, remembering and creating stories of Chicago, looking out over the expanse of the great lake, toward the first star of the summer night.

I hate packing. Hating it slows me down. Sometimes I'll take two hours to pack for an overnight trip - for one gig. I want to be done quickly, but I have to figure out the banalities of what goes and what stays. It's the varying scope of the challenge that gets me; i.e., how many different weather, business, health and social variables must I intuit this time, and how much of what could happen in the next 24 hours (or 48 hours or two weeks') can fit in this small bag?

Nevertheless, here I go packing again, wrecking the night before & then leaving by 5:30 in the morning to drive to O'Hare. Having overcome the usual fly morning headaches by a timely 7:00, I find the band and I have won the daily double. Our flight is delayed & we get to spend the next six-and-a-half hours in an airport waiting to fly two. On a Sunday. On the other end waits Hartford, Conn., where we played, I think, once before, in a doctor's house. I remember snow and try not to watch the clock.

Hartford is blazing hot this time. We walk around for an hour dodging flops in the otherwise deserted, scorching upturned dumpster streets before giving up and finally taking lunch back in the hotel. It's just LH and me. We talk about the cover art problem and the gigs I have planned for the release week. Also about The Palm, and how the time in the rhythm section is feeling these days, and whatever else is on the list. And how tired we are.

Ten minute nap in the room. Warm up next, and play for a while. Check the time. Fix the set list and dress. Call the cats. Dig the contract. Grab the charts and the microphone and the discs and the briefcase and elevator down to the lobby to go.

We're over to the gig in time to catch Gary Burton and XXXXXX composing intricacies to a crowd of 15,000 laid out under the summer sun, on the late afternoon rise of the expanding capitol green. That's the first handsome thing I've seen all day. By the time we're through with our set and it's dark and Herbie Mann comes on,10,000 more will have come out with their beers and their baskets of chicken and their umbrella hats. How about that! People want to hear it in Hartford! I hang back to check out Herbie's band, sign some discs & down the (very good) spicy ribs and corn they have going back stage. They treat us real nice & everybody seems jaked.

When I hook up with the cats again, they're washing down the last of a huge plate of greasy hot buffalo wings with icy vodka in the hotel sports bar, gawping at the final ten minutes of "The Green Mile" as it plays out on the ten-inch screen which is bolted to the orange formica table where they're hunched. I'm in Hartford with the band. Right now, back home, dark-haired Jenny is having friends over, eating olives and drinking wine on the plant-filled back porch with candles and incense. It will be another fourteen hours or so until I'm home.

Cats and I got to play music for an hour. One hour of what we do vs. twenty-three of doing what we have to. We don't get paid to play. We get paid to travel.

Well, I guess I'll just come up with a cover for the record on my own. Time is running out, in spite of all the good planning. If there's no mutually approved cover in twenty-four hours - that means artist, manager, label and me- we'll have to bump the release date. There simply won't be enough time to get the manufacturer to physically produce copies in time to have anything in the stores by August 28. And that means all the many gigs which I have personally envisioned, planned and solidified on calendars across town would become a lot of fuss over nothing. All the non-refundable events of week one - the NPR-sponsored free master class and concert at Roosevelt, the open rehearsals at Gallery 37, the gig with all three horns at the Mill on Wednesday, the press push on Thursday and even the prime-time Chicago Festival hit on Friday - would amount to one very public attention-grab pointing to nothing but empty jewel cases.

It's funny. Jenny and I had so much talk about my lazing around all summer & recuperating from the bruises and warping and growing of the last bunch of years - just wanting to dig sides & work on music, read and work on the house & go swimming and dig some of the huge Chicago scene. So of course I end up spending all the time I usually spend wearing myself out - taking on the assault of the road, jet lag packing, doing six- hour interview sessions from anonymous, window-won't-open hotel rooms, minding the band, driving the vans, enduring the food, the endless airport hassles, trying to land on my last-minute feet somewhere solid in the middle of the squishy strangeness of it all and still be musical - I take all that time and I put it to use planning the next round. And now - right now - I need to design a record cover. How droll.