My Father Tries to Teach Me His Map of Chicago
April 14, 2025 at 10:55PMFor Electric Literature, Maggie Andersen writes about how her father showed his love with rides to the bus stop, trips that helped her learn personal responsibility as a teen traveling to school. Andersen examines her dad’s subtle lessons about what you can and cannot afford to lose—both financially and emotionally—and the lengths he went to make sure she was safe while she acquired the navigation and interpersonal communication skills it takes to be an adult in this world.
It was still dark when we got into my father’s Caprice, an undercover narcotics car. We drove up California Boulevard, past the gas company, and when we turned at Belmont, my dad told me the plan. He was a police officer and knew it wasn’t safe for young girls to wait for the bus on unlit corners, so he’d drive up to Kimball where there was a lot of traffic; I’d be safe there. Years later, when I am an adult, he tells me that one of his worst cases was a high-school girl who was brutally raped on her way to ROTC at five o’clock in the morning. The heartbreak of his career was delivering her to her father, a pretzel of a body in a raggedy blanket.
I’m trying to make a map of the city with my father in it, but the truth is: he’s been the cartographer all along, steadfastly believing I’d learn to read his directions.
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from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/04/14/my-father-tries-to-teach-me-his-map-of-chicago/
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