Home is where the bratwurst is

We traveled here in the roughest of ways. We flew.

At LAX, there was a man wearing capri pants, ankle-length slacks of the kind Bobbie Jo wore on these old episodes of “Petticoat Junction.” It’s just the sort of sight that keeps me from traveling much. In another year or two, I probably won’t even leave my bedroom.

“Want some latte?” the older daughter offers while we await our flight.

“It’s not very hot,” I say after a sip.

“It’s exactly 150 degrees,” she says. “I ordered it special.”

It’s good that we live in a nation where you can do that. We can’t control our borders. We can’t teach our children algebra. But we can order coffee drinks at the temperature of our choice. I guess you have to start somewhere.

“Can I go get a Cinnabon?” the little girl asks.

“Where?”

“Terminal 2,” she says.

In this day and age, some people are intimidated by flying. Not the ones I live with.

While we await our flight, they visit every corner of this vast airport. They chat up the sales people, sample the drinking fountains, salute every passing pilot.

Traveling with them is like accompanying a band of Amish children, excited by every simple thing. Aboard the plane, after the instructional video ends, they all applaud it.

“Oh, my God,” I tell my wife when the clapping dies down.

“It’s only a five-hour flight,” she says, which might be the least soothing thing anyone has ever said to me.

First, a few apologies. To the passenger in seat 20D, directly in front of us, who midway through the flight enjoyed the lovely sensation of a 1-year-old’s sticky fingers combing his thinning hair.

Or to the pilot, who high over South Dakota announced that we were experiencing some “clear air turbulence.” It was really just one of my kids closing the tray table much too hard, over and over and over.

And most of all, to me, in seat 21F, who had to change the baby’s toxic diaper -- I know not how -- in the space between me and the seat in front of us. Like Houdini, I don’t fully understand how I’m able to pull off many of my better tricks.

In the end, of course, this Con Air flight was well worth it. For we finally landed in this endearing little metropolis by the lake, where their grandmother and cousins live, a 40-cent toll ride from O’Hare.

Here on the outskirts of Chicago, there are farms and hay trucks and big mansions where other farms once stood. Fish jump with joy in the lakes and the people have these creamy complexions that come from steady diets of good cheese, cold beer and the occasional cigarette. And those are just the grandmas.

“Can we move here?” the little girl asks.

I stand in the backyard of the house my father built, turning brats on the grill and watching the way the sun glints off the antenna on the rooftop next door, just as it did back in 1971.

“See, it looks like an airplane,” says my mother.

“Yep,” I say.

“It’s like that every August,” she says.

As the bratwurst hisses, I listen to the train horns I was raised on, and the church bells that signal happy hour each day at 5. I hear the high school marching band, rehearsing Big 10 fight songs a mile away, the best fight songs of all.

Can we move here? Why the heck not.

“That nice place across the street?” someone says during a cocktail party the next night.

“Yes?”

“Sold for almost $300,000,” she says.

“That’s insane,” someone else says.

It is insane. From a California perspective, insanely cheap. The urge is to cash out back in L.A. and live mortgage free here in the mighty Middle West. In time, we could probably snag tickets to Cubs games, which seem always sold out. Wrigley is becoming the Parthenon of sports complexes, more revered with each fallen brick.

And if we moved back, we’d have four seasons again. I was raised on weather and always miss it. Life’s more interesting when Tuesday is different from Wednesday. November different from March.

But I fear this town where I grew up may have changed far too much. Where barbershops once stood, now there are stockbroker offices. Instead of hardware stores, there are children’s boutiques no one can afford.

And each evening at 6, well-dressed professionals squeeze out of the commuter trains with that awful, soulless gaze you see on riders getting off any sort of overcrowded mass transit. The worst part: I don’t recognize a single face.

Do our hometowns ever get better over time? Probably not. Hopefully, that’ll never keep us from coming back to visit.

“Look at that sky,” the boy says, pointing at buttermilk clouds.

“I love it here,” the older daughter says.

Me too.

Chris Erskine can be reached at chris.erskine@latimes.com.