It was warm on the day that I took this picture. It was a year since I’d enjoyed warmth with the Renderosity Photo Ninjas, but it felt like mere days. It might have been a Thursday when this picture revealed itself to me, it might have been a Wednesday. The ultimate day doesn’t matter; what counts is the scene itself: Chicago at its most honest, its most real. It was a pleasant day and the city bounced, jiggled, and shimmied with a kind of life seldom expressed in these later days of urban domestication. I stood a few steps from the Berghoff, stunned at how utterly German the place looked, sitting—as it did—like some squat senior citizen among taller, younger buildings. It was quiet, unnoticed, and proud. I liked that: I sensed a kind of graceful defiance in it. I was happy. A few steps later, I found myself entranced by something I didn’t expect. The sky—blue and tinged with cloud fluff—had been largely obscured by the taller, brasher buildings marking Chicago’s business core, but the sky had (with some help) decided to settle closer to the level of Adams Street. It nearly touched the ground: not as the sky itself, and not as fog, but as a reflection—a clarification of everything that the sky might be. It was bright. It defied the darkened, cloying shadows of Downtown, and though other buildings found reason to barge into the reflection of sky and clouds, they did so with a brilliance uncommon to their breed. I suppose I can learn the name of the building pictured here, but I rather like not knowing. It gives me the freedom to call it something else. I rather like the way in which it wears a face of glass—from roof to sidewalk, with only a metal skeleton to interrupt the crystalline purity of it. I like the way in which the reflections captured here are not rigid. The building, as I saw it (and as I see it now) might be hewn from ice, or liquid water with a peculiar, solidifying molecular twist. In short, I like the reflections, and the way in which they dance, jiggle, and shimmy in the way Chicago seemed to do on that particular day. Because this is largely an image of glass, of light and reflections, I’m reminded of a particular “Light and Glass Lady” here on Renderosity; she’s had a birthday, recently, and so it’s only fitting that I present this as at least one birthday present—belated, of course, but I tend to miss birthdays, including my own, and so this one’s for Tara (auntietk). She might actually have seen this building while doing the Photo Ninja thing in Chicago…it’s a bit far from Reza’s, but not too far from the Art Institute, and it’s a shimmery, pretty thing, even on dull, cloudy days. It was warm on the day that I took this picture, and a year since I’d enjoyed the warmth with the Renderosity Photo Ninjas, but as I look at this photo now, I find that I look for familiar faces in the human-scale crowd of pedestrians…maybe on close inspection I’ll see Photo Ninjas, and even if I don’t, it’s still nice to imagine them there in breezy blue shirts or eye-catching green flipflops, tee-shirts with dragons on them, or in snazzy, reflective-blue sunglasses. And so, with this picture: Happy Birthday to Tara! Keep having fun and enjoying all sorts of gorgeous, glassy things. As always, thank you for viewing, reading, and commenting, and hopefully you’re all having a great (and warmer) weekend than Chicago is currently offering.