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flash mob of crazy young people that organized on the internet? A University of Chicago hazing ritual?
    I have no clue. The scene makes no sense.
    I know, I know. This is where I’m supposed to say something pithy, right? Something like, “White people crazy.” But I can’t. For one, I can’t tell for sure that these people are white, because of the darkness and the falling snow—and, yes, because the eyes of a man of advanced age are not what they once were—I am unable to discern much more than silhouettes. The ages, sexes, and races of these winter waders are obscured entirely by the shadows. But one thing is sure: they are playing around in the surf or walking out of the water and up onto the land, in the middle of a snowstorm. Many appear dripping wet from head to toe. Are there blankets and heaters secreted away amongst the rocks? Are there warm, running cars hidden between the trees? There must be. There have to be. Otherwise, this activity is a recipe for frostbite and death.
    But I can see no idling cars, and no caches of blankets and heating packs along the shoreline. I only see, every twenty yards or so, another wet person walking around in the surf, like an idiot.
    Maybe some people don’t have enough problems. Maybe they can’t think of all the helpful and useful things they could be doing with their time. Maybe their lives are so boring and confused that they need hypothermia to make it interesting.
    Okay, fine. I’m ‘a say it.
    White people crazy.

    After twenty minutes, I exit Lake Shore Drive and take an off ramp heading past the Loop—downtown Chicago, where the tallest buildings are.
    It’s still kind ofbugging me out—the polar bear club people— so I try to busy myself worrying about Ms. Washington.
    The first thing to know about her is that she’s one of the only members of my flock who left South Shore but still comes back for church. Ms. Washington moved up north a few years ago when she inherited a place from her sister who passed. The neighborhood is called Logan Square, after John A. Logan. (He ran for vice president 150 years ago and lost, is my understanding. Apparently, that’s good enough to get a neighborhood named after you.) Forty years ago, Logan Square was as dangerous as South Shore; more dangerous maybe. Latin street gangs fighting for turf and shooting up the residents. Now it’s better, and white people have moved in. That’s how the neighborhoods generally evolve in this town—how the gentrification runs. White people pushing out Latinos. The Loop inexorably pushing its way west and south to where blacks live.
    Too often, my Latin brothers and sisters are the buffer between the blacks and the whites. I do not envy them. They bear the brunt of the gentrification—having to make a choice every generation between staying in a neighborhood that no longer feels like home or uprooting to move a mile west if they still want the signs on the stores to be in Spanish.
    God help them—for I, certainly, cannot. Dios mío. Dios mío, indeed.
    But Ms. Washington . . . she is a firecracker. I like the fact that she’s chosen to make her stand up in Logan Square. So what if she could sell the place and live out her final years high on the hog in South Shore? It’s in the family, and she’s gonna take it over. Amen.
    Driving through neighborhoods and watching the demographics change like this has always made me wonder—what does “success” look like for Chicago? What are we all working toward?
    I mean, The Church of Heaven’s God in Christ Lord Jesus needs a new roof and a new pipe organ. That would feel like s uccess to me. A roof that doesn’t leak when it rains and organ music that people can hear back in the last pew would be a little bit of success. But think bigger, Pastor Mack . . . what about the whole neighborhood? What about the whole city?
    These are the questions that