I have been living with The Boys the last few days inj the heart of the urban Midwest. It has been an interesting experience. Some of it is common experience, and not that far away in time and space. Getting used to living without a dishwasher, for example, either washing as you go or letting it pile up.

Sorting clothing in piles on the floor, since there are no dressers or bureaus. These are things the generations share as they start out in the wide world, highly mobile and lightly burdened, and particularly in an urban environment. It comes with cost, of course, all the freedom and uncertainty. My son who lives in this Windy City just calls it the Urban Tax.

Last night, we walked to the Jewel market, and actual supermarket, though a little smaller and much more crowded than the ones I am used to, even the Ft. Myer Commissary on a Saturday morning, chock-filled with retirees and active-duty folks stocking up for the week's needs. The Commissary draws them in from all over to get the bulk savings of the Defense Commissary System. They come by car and truck.

The Jewel is of a different model. Much of the traffic is walk-in. I asked my son how far it was to the market and he said "a couple blocks." pointing vaguely to the west away from Wrigley Field. Later, trudging through ten of them I saw the sign in the distance. Out of the neighborhood, in another part of Chicago.

I marveled at the logistics of it. Getting a load of groceries was an intricate dance of bulk and weight. Of course there are work-arounds; a cab each way might suffice, but such luxuries are exactly that. We carried a few bags of precious cargo from the store back to the apartment, four flights up.

If the Jewel did not exist, there would doubtless be more bodegas in the neighborhood. But the Jewel offeres more variety at a better price, and it killed the little stores. That is the urban tax at work.

None of the kids have cars. It is too expensive, for one, and there is no place to put them if you live in an apartment, particularly one down the street from a major sporting venue that fills with tens of thousands on a game day. The parking enforcement is ruthless, as befits a straight-ahead no-bullshit city.

There was no fake sugar on the table at the Salt and Pepper Diner on clark Street when I had breakfast with the boys, and lookiing around, there was none to be seen in the whole restaurant. Chicago is a real Midwestern place filled with real Midwestern things. Fakes are not appreciated.

I was a fake, though my visage as a Midwesterner was plausible enough. To enhance it, I purchsed a Cubs t-shirt after the game on Sunday, and discovered that I literally diasppeared into the background noise without a glance from my felllow citizens. Head up, straight ahead. Chicago.

There was a curious thing about this trup, since I also blended into the world of my sons. It was a bit like being a member of a film crew on the set of a reality show. After a while the young men ceased to note my existance, taking me with my Cubbies shirt to be another peice of the background. In Bucktown, we watched sports. In Wrigleyville we watched sports.

This is something different than the way it was growing up in the Midwest long ago, when Dad and his friends had to hang on the rootop to direct the antenna toward Lansing to get a television signal from a blacked-out Lions game in Detroit. The fuzzy black-and-white that popped up ("That's good! Don't move! Don't fall!) was as god as it got.

Today, the young men may not have cars, but they have electronics. There were 52-inch high-definition flat screens in all the apartments we visited. They are remarkable peices of technology, and it occurred to me along the way, that the article in the Atlantic about our technology changing the way we think is absolutely correct. One of my sons friends is a real fanatic =about the Resksins, which obviously has little attraction to the larger Chicago market. Accordingly, he signed up for satellite television, and an NFL viewing package that delivers all the games on Sunday. There is a menu option that permits the display of all the games simultaneously on the screen, five across in two rows. You can move a cursor that directs the audio feed from one little box to another, permitting the watcher to leap from commentary to commentary, Washington to Chicago to LA.

There are all the jokes about men and remote controls for the television, and the way we constantly hop along the channels.

This takes things to an entirely new level, and there was more information pouring off the screen than I could digest. The young men seemed to have no problem with it. They are well conditioned to it all, and were scrolling tohrugh their cell-phones while watching.

This is something new. How the brain is taught to process information from all these disparate information streams has been a topic in the literature for years. But seeing it accelerate before my eyes was a revelation.

City people are a little more aware, a little more focused, than people from the suburbs. They have to be, since there is such a diversity of things happening. It is a sort of urban tax on the senses, and one that the geneations have shared since life began to accelerate in cities like Imperial Rome.

Still, it appears to me that we are paying a much higher tax these days, and our children are becoming citizens of some new place altogether.