As regular readers know, we're stretched extremely thin at this point, and I gave up going to my 30th college reunion to have some "flex" for her birthday. The main "gift" she wanted was a "sweat equity" sort of thing, digging out the front bathtub which had been "converted to storage" back when the building replaced all the windows a few years back ... she wanted "her" bathtub back ... so I spent good chunks of the past couple of weeks sorting, moving, and even throwing out stuff (3 whole old computer systems, minus their hard drives). I took off half a day on Tuesday to do some last minute shopping (so there'd be stuff from The Girls and the various pets), got flowers and a cake, and then we took her out last night (we're also going out on Saturday).
We ended up going to The Kerryman, an "Irish pub" that she'd wanted to check out for quite a while. Since the weather was nice, we waited for an outside table, and were in the seating area shown in this picture, along the Erie St. side of the building. At one point, before we got seated, I ducked inside, and had "a moment". Standing there, in the main downstairs bar room, it suddenly flooded back to my brain that I was, in a time-displaced form, standing in O'Banion's!
Now, this wasn't a "sudden revelation", I'd known that this was where O'Banion's had been, but this was the first time I'd stood in that room in a quarter century. If you follow that link, you'll see a pic of how it looked "back in the day" ... when it was pretty much the center of the emerging Chicago punk scene. Now, I will admit, O'Banions was not one of my "regular spots" (I tended to hang out more at Neo up at Clark & Fullerton and Exit back when it was on Wells St.), but I got dragged down there by friends every month or so, and was familiar with the scene.
It's always amazing to have one of those "time rushes" when a whole long-neglected mental file gets opened and you find that where you are is where you were, but in completely different contexts!