The flight to Chicago was crowded, but not intolerable. We sat up front in the middle section. The only hitch in the flight was an annoucement that, because of video difficulties, there would be no film on the flight which, since the movie would have been Disney’s The Kid, sent a palpable wave of relief through the cabin.

The plane arrived at O’Hare on time at around midnight, and we had to work out how we were going to reach Highland Park. Washed up at a bleak bank of payphones along with other exhausted looking travelers trying to score a ride. Eventually Michael got through to a taxi company.

It was a long, long drive across a dark, flat, alien landscape, with only occasional neighborhoods of fat brick houses visible from the highway, very northern looking behind the spidery black branches of bare trees. I felt unreasonably troubled by the lack of lit windows. (It was, after all, around 2:00 AM by then.)

We got lost in Highland Park. It’s amazing how completely black and sinister a civilized suburb of ranch houses can be when they’re too badly lit to illuminate street signs. At one point, the driver pulled over to consult a map. We found the street after that, and we paid him in the driveway, picked up our bags, and walked to the unlocked front door.

Shall I count the ways this journey would have gone differently today? Half-assed, not especially popular movies shown to the whole plane cabin on a single screen and a single audio system. Banks of pay phones at the airport that you had to stand in line to use. A taxi, rather than an uber. A paper map…