The view has certainly changed. We are up in the air and look out on constantly moving traffic, a glowing light sculpture that lines Congress and whose colors change in patterns I have yet to figure out. But it is those owls perched on top of the library that draw me in and I watch and wait to see what happens to them. Today they are being rained on and they look sad, a crow lands and looks like a tiny black speck in comparison to their large hulking size.

I’m enjoying my walks down State Street, a street I knew in college when I worked and took classes at The Art Institute, but when did Carson’s in the beautiful Sullivan building become a Target and why is C.D. Peacock Jewelers now a Kay Jewelry store? I used to look in that Peacock window at the rubies on display in July, since it was my birthstone. It was such a treat, after a day of waitressing at the garden restaurant in the Art Institute. I’ll never find Macy’s worthy of that Marshall Fields clock, or those elevators with the grains of wheat in the Fields logo.

The 19th-century philosopher Hegel famously noted that “the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk”—meaning that philosophy comes to understand a historical condition just as it passes away. Perhaps I’ll come to an understanding about Marshall Fields, but I don’t think so.