Tuesday night, I was sitting in a coffee shop, talking to a former Chicago cop about what it feels like to be shot.

Wednesday morning found me at a rehearsal of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, asking a percussionist about a distinctive bass drum.

Say what you will about the city, it certainly runs the gamut, A to Z, and my job is to trot alongside, taking notes. Talk about lucky.

Though it can be a challenge — for me, anyway — to strike a balance. Is Chicago a horror show? A musical delight? Crime scenes or flower beds? Hard to decide. Focus on the downsides of city life, the bloodshed and poverty, and it feels an offense against the springtime. Summer doesn’t officially begin for another three weeks, though now that we’ve checked off Memorial Day, it seems tantalizingly near, setting up its linen tents. June starts Saturday.

But escape into the pleasures of city life during these peak months, the nice restaurants, fascinating museums and one of the great orchestras in the world, and it seems a willful blindness. Children are burning to death in Gaza and I’m musing over pineapple salsa.

So it’s a lose-lose? Whatever you think is wrong? That can’t be right.

The answer, I believe, is to ply the range, the good and the bad. Absorb it all. Keep moving, looking around with an eye to the future. The beauty of things that haven’t happened yet is we don’t know how they’ll transpire. The pivotal Chicago event this summer will be the Democratic National Convention, and until it actually occurs, there’s always the hope it could, theoretically, work out fine. Like in 1996, with new iron railings everywhere, the West Side revitalized and everyone saying how the ghosts of 1968 are finally laid to rest.

Only they weren’t laid to rest were they? They’re still very much here, out of their graves and prowling the shadows. Yes, the convention could buff the gouges out of the city’s battered reputation. It’s possible. But you’d have to be an idiot to expect that. Not when all the ingredients for full-blown, 1968-level disaster are lined up on the counter, waiting to be mixed together. Every aggrieved person in the country heading to Chicago to raise their klaxon voices about a panoply of gut-twisting crises. A party nominating an octogenarian grandpa that even its stalwarts don’t feel excited about. A timorous amateur in City Hall who couldn’t plan a successful sack race.

Enough. The convention is 10 weeks away. Why waste the best time to be in Chicago worrying? Not when we’ve each got our own small private concerns.

I sure do. My oldest son is getting married on a beach in Michigan in mid-July. I prepared for the event by buying a seersucker suit. If I had to weigh these two worries — Chicago torn apart by strife, or people smirking at a guy who seems to think he’s an extra in a Merchant Ivory movie — the honest answer is the second concern, hands down. “Are you sure this doesn’t look like a costume?” I asked my wife. “I’ve never seen anyone wearing one of these, ever.” Then again, I’m not a habitue of croquet parties.

But I believe in personal rules, predetermined pole stars to follow at moments of duress. Approaching the wedding, my mantra has been, “Whatever the bride wants.” I texted her a photo of the seersucker suit while I was still in the store. She approved.

Besides, it’s not about me. A second wedding mantra. I’m a supernumerary, an extra. The truth is I could show up dressed as Little Bo Peep, complete with crooked staff — I saw a guy wearing close to that on the Metra once — and nobody would notice or care. All eyes would be where they belong: the happy couple.

That’s a plan: try not to make the summer all about you. A lofty goal, perhaps, but then, as Robert Browning said, our reach should exceed our grasp or what’s a heaven for?

Maybe the answer is to live in the moment. Don’t worry about the future — it hasn’t happened yet. There will be a convention of some sorts. The wedding will occur, and if I dump my glass of red NA wine down my seersucker suit while trying to make a toast, well, then that is what will happen, and I’ll dance joyfully with a big blue stain on my pants. We are here, now, for good and ill, and the temperature won’t fall below zero until at least December. November at the earliest. Make hay while the sun shines.