Arachnophonic
It’s interesting, really, what events I find I’m able to sleep through and what events I’m not able to sleep through. As it goes, I’m not able to sleep through the sensation of something crawling into my ear while I sleep.
Again, it was while I lived out in the boonies behind the pecan orchard in Bumph Huck, Georgia, when earlyearly one dark morning I awoke in a terror as I felt some THING crawling into my right ear, and was overcome with a dread worse than that of death as I realized it was in too far for me to stop it.
I slapped at the side of my head, tilted my ear downward while pounding on the left side of my head in the hopes that, whatever it was would fall out.
The entire time, I was in a full-body shudder of spastic proportions, a full-blown panic as I didn’t know WHAT it was or what it was DOING in my ear! All I could think of was that episode of (I think) Star Trek where all those Enterprise crew members you never saw before had their brains eaten by some insidious insects that entered hungry and exited sated through the ears of their host buffets.
And then the sensation of crawling in my ear stopped, followed by quiet, and then followed by a purring vibration. OH GOD! It was DRILLING! It was going to punch through to my brain any second now and start gorging its little self on my grey matter and by daylight I’d be babbling non-sentences at my dog!
After a few minutes the purring stopped. Returned intermittently, and then stopped all together.
I made several futile attempts to look into my ear using only one mirror. If I had an ear syringe I would have used it, but I was fresh out of ear syringes.
I debated with myself. Does this warrant a trip to the emergency room? Is whatever it is sucking brain cells through a straw-like proboscis as I think, my capacity to do so ebbing ever so unnoticeably away? Has it already left my head?
With the quiet in my ear, I calmed down and thought rationally. Whatever it is is now resting contentedly…or died in there. So I decided I would go back to bed, try to sleep, and if I could feel it moving around again in the morning, I would go to the emergency room and have it extracted.
Surprisingly, I fell asleep. When my alarm went off I awoke and lay quietly to try to hear any movement inside. Nothing. I returned to the bathroom mirror and tugged on my earlobe and pressed a fingertip into the opening of the ear canal, forming a seal and pulling outward, hoping the suction would do something positive.
Still, nothing came out on my finger or into the outer ear. Just as I was agreeing with myself that it was time to go to the emergency room, I looked down to the front edge of the bathroom washbasin and saw a little black dot. Upon closer inspection I could tell that the little black dot was actually a little brown spider, its body all curled and caked in earwax, dead. The poor little thing had crawled into the warm little hole in my head only to be trapped in the secretory quagmire within. The purring vibrations I felt and heard must have been its little legs trying desperately to beat an escape, but, mired in cerumen, the more it struggled, the more thoroughly it was encased, and soon, death.
I experienced one more gentle quivering full-body shudder, and threw the poor little thing in the garbage.
The more I think about it, the more I’m struck that, with all the places I’ve been, in all the places I’ve slept, it hasn’t occurred more than this one time that something has crawled into my head for a look around.
And maybe it has happened more than once, but whatever came in looked around and saw nothing inspiring, and so left again.
And maybe I’m not surprised, after all.
Sunday, December 16, 2007
Thursday, December 06, 2007
A Northern Boy's Tales of the Deep South, part 2
Arachnophobic Angel
I grew up thinking that animals, though capable of great intelligence, some even more so than we believe them capable, hit a ceiling where reason and sensibility are beyond them. They live at the level of instinct and the drive to eat. Thus, as my thinking goes, they don’t get the creeps over silly phobias, such as needles or the sight of blood or a scalpel slicing open an infected, pus-oozing limb.
Little did I know.
Angel had been playing outside somewhere on "my" 32 acres in Bumph Huck, Georgia, one particularly lovely summer day, but she had grown tired of it, or had become curious about what might be going on indoors (read: what I might have been eating that she could possibly benefit from if some fell on the floor), so she pawed at the door, begging to come in.
I opened the door and she looked up at me. As I looked down at her I noticed a familiar shape on the floor just beyond the threshold from me, practically between Angel’s front paws: a large spider. If memory serves me, its size, including leg span, would have covered most of my palm…had I the balls to let it be there! Say, roughly, 2-1/2 to three inches in diameter – not monstrously huge, but larger than your average live-in-a-hole-catching-flies-in-a-web spider. It definitely was not a "Daddy Long-Legs."
I’m not particularly afraid of or creeped out by spiders – though a story about that is coming later – so I simply shifted my focus from Angel to the spider and marveled mildly at it. Though an intelligent dog, Angel never had the smarts to look in the direction I was pointing, but instead looked at the hand I was pointing with, as that’s usually what held the object of her interest. Imagine my surprise, then, when she looked to where I was looking. She bent her head down and found the spider idling there between her paws.
And Angel S P A Z Z E D !! She frantically lifted one paw, then the other, in an effort to keep her feet away from the spider, resulting in a hilarious little dance that lasted about one second, and then she literally leapt backwards! The spider, on the other hand, never moved.
I burst out laughing at my hapless dog! She was actually FREAKED OUT by the spider just being there. Her little freaked doggie dance was every bit as pathetically hilarious as my snake-induced quivering full-body shudder(s). But I wasn’t laughing at her as much as I was at the realization that she, a dog, displayed an aversion to spiders! Of course, the freaked doggie dance was all hers; pure Angel!
I don’t know if a dog can understand laughter, what it means is going on inside the head and body of a human. They can understand anger, particularly if it’s directed at them, but laughter, I don’t know. She did seem a little embarrassed for a few minutes afterward. Certainly I accept any skepticism at my use of that word, as it ascribes a human emotion to a lowly beast. But she did walk around sheepishly for a little while after the incident.
**sigh** I sure miss that goofy girl.
I grew up thinking that animals, though capable of great intelligence, some even more so than we believe them capable, hit a ceiling where reason and sensibility are beyond them. They live at the level of instinct and the drive to eat. Thus, as my thinking goes, they don’t get the creeps over silly phobias, such as needles or the sight of blood or a scalpel slicing open an infected, pus-oozing limb.
Little did I know.
Angel had been playing outside somewhere on "my" 32 acres in Bumph Huck, Georgia, one particularly lovely summer day, but she had grown tired of it, or had become curious about what might be going on indoors (read: what I might have been eating that she could possibly benefit from if some fell on the floor), so she pawed at the door, begging to come in.
I opened the door and she looked up at me. As I looked down at her I noticed a familiar shape on the floor just beyond the threshold from me, practically between Angel’s front paws: a large spider. If memory serves me, its size, including leg span, would have covered most of my palm…had I the balls to let it be there! Say, roughly, 2-1/2 to three inches in diameter – not monstrously huge, but larger than your average live-in-a-hole-catching-flies-in-a-web spider. It definitely was not a "Daddy Long-Legs."
I’m not particularly afraid of or creeped out by spiders – though a story about that is coming later – so I simply shifted my focus from Angel to the spider and marveled mildly at it. Though an intelligent dog, Angel never had the smarts to look in the direction I was pointing, but instead looked at the hand I was pointing with, as that’s usually what held the object of her interest. Imagine my surprise, then, when she looked to where I was looking. She bent her head down and found the spider idling there between her paws.
And Angel S P A Z Z E D !! She frantically lifted one paw, then the other, in an effort to keep her feet away from the spider, resulting in a hilarious little dance that lasted about one second, and then she literally leapt backwards! The spider, on the other hand, never moved.
I burst out laughing at my hapless dog! She was actually FREAKED OUT by the spider just being there. Her little freaked doggie dance was every bit as pathetically hilarious as my snake-induced quivering full-body shudder(s). But I wasn’t laughing at her as much as I was at the realization that she, a dog, displayed an aversion to spiders! Of course, the freaked doggie dance was all hers; pure Angel!
I don’t know if a dog can understand laughter, what it means is going on inside the head and body of a human. They can understand anger, particularly if it’s directed at them, but laughter, I don’t know. She did seem a little embarrassed for a few minutes afterward. Certainly I accept any skepticism at my use of that word, as it ascribes a human emotion to a lowly beast. But she did walk around sheepishly for a little while after the incident.
**sigh** I sure miss that goofy girl.
Saturday, December 01, 2007
A Northern Boy's Tales of the Deep South, part 1
Guardian Angel
In a recent post at No Accent Yet, Tiff shared the hilarious tale of her “harrowing” experience with a spider in her car. Unlike Tiff, I’m generally okay with spiders; I just don’t want them crawling on me…or worse.
Tiff’s tale brought up a memory for me of something involving a spider that occurred when I was living in deep southwest Georgia, and then, as a consequence, other memories of funny stuff flooded in. And so, I am inspired to share them here. But not all at once.
As far as I can recall, and as far as I am aware, I have never been in a real life-and-death situation. Okay, well, maybe once. Sure, some may say that, since I often fly commercially, I am putting my life in someone else’s hands… How does that joke go? “When I die, I want to go quietly in my sleep, just like Grampa did; not screaming and crying like his passengers on his bus.”
No. Never really life-and-death. But at least I know that, during her lifetime, Angel, my Dalmatian, was ready to defend me to the best of her abilities.
I had lived in Bumph Huck, Georgia, for just over a year and a half, paying rent beyond what I could afford simply because it was the only place I found that would take a large dog. When I started looking for another place, a co-worker of mine named Bob, a very timid, cowardly man (I am not exaggerating) approached me and said that there was a piece of property owned by his family, which they had rented out in the past. It wasn’t the prettiest structure, but it was on a nice piece of property out in the woods next to a creek. I asked him how much rent he would be asking.
He lowered his head and stammered, “Well, we’ve asked as much as a hundred and fifty dollars.”
My knees nearly buckled as, surely, I was dreaming! “A HUNDRED FIFTY?!”
This was 1996.
Bob cowered a little. “We could ask for less…it’s okay.”
“LESS?” I couldn’t help but shout. “I’ll take it for one-fifty!”
“But you haven’t even seen the place!”
“Bob, right now I’d be glad to live in a cardboard box for one-fifty a month!”
The place was exactly as he had described. Tucked away in the woods behind a pecan orchard, it was a slightly glorified hunter's shack, built of cinder-blocks, and perched atop a sloping bank, with a large, picture-window view to a wide creek below. There was a massive concrete deck wrapped around two sides of it, and the rectangular building was covered with a heavy-beam, lodge-type roof. With the exception of the drab, unpainted cinder-blocks, the house and land were actually quite beautiful!
On Labor Day weekend, with the help of a friend and a co-worker, I moved in. As all moving days are, it had been a long day. Before I could even begin to unpack, the sun sank below the horizon, so I made sure I took care of the important tasks first – I set up my TV and reclining chair in the far corner, opposite the entry door and the kitchen. There was a fireplace on the end where I had set my chair, but Bob had apologetically forbade me using it because the chimney was cracked (the whole house was on a 40-year slide down the hill, so there were fundamental cracks in the concrete). On either side of the fireplace were built-in firewood bins with hinged wooden covers, great for setting things on, like asses and glasses.
The very next day I set to unpacking and setting things out. In the afternoon I took a break to make myself a sandwich and to lunch in my recliner in front of the TV. Angel, the poor soul I had already moved three times before she was three years old, was homesick for the last place, and was constantly expectant that we were going “home” every time I stood up, and would bolt for the car. As I sat and ate, she stood about four feet in front of me and stared at me. When I finished eating and set the plate on the table beside me, she stood and stared at me.
And then I stared at her. All I saw in her eyes was expectation. And then her eyes shifted from mine to the area just to my right.
And she growled.
Angel was a gentle soul; unless we were playing tug with one of her toys, I never heard her growl a serious growl…well, at least until we moved in with the future Mrs. Farrago and her dogs, but that’s another story.
It started very quietly, but it grew louder as her gaze intensified. For a brief moment I thought she was growling at me, since I’d heard it said that you should never stare into a dog’s eyes, which I had been doing. But then I realized she was definitely looking at something to my right and… b e h i n d m e . . .
I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Angel was serious. I turned my head slowly, absolutely clueless as to what she could possibly be looking at. My eyes scanned the wall until they came to rest on something in the corner which hadn't been there before, on top of the wooden bin lid...about three feet away from me. A snake.
S N A K E ! !
The human body is capable of things we can’t possibly envision ourselves doing. How do I know this? I was seated in a soft, comfy reclining chair. I was reclined in this reclining chair. I had leaned forward and my torso was twisted to look at something behind me. The next thing I knew, I was standing behind Angel. I’m certain I flew there. When the quivering full-body shudder stopped I screamed “HOLY SHIT!” …and commenced another quivering full-body shudder.
While I raced frantically around my humble abode to find something with which to kill the snake, Angel stood calmly, quietly, protectively, and watched the snake. I found a baseball bat. I ran to the corner and then I realized that striking at the snake would mean getting to within 34 inches of a LIVE SNAKE! What kind of snake is it? I DON’T KNOW! Is it poisonous? I DON’T KNOW! If I missed it with the bat (I know my own record in baseball all too well!) could it – would it strike at me?
The bat wasn’t a good idea. I didn’t really want to kill the snake anyway, I just didn’t want it to kill me! I ran around for a while more and then I grabbed a can of Raid insect repellent. I didn’t suspect I could kill the snake with Raid, but I could make it really uncomfortable. I sprayed the snake, which then made a mad dash from whence it came, into a separation between the wall of the woodbin and the wall of the house. I sprayed that crack and all of the interior of that woodbin until the can was nearly empty!
After the holiday, when I went back to work, I told my frightening story to some of my co-workers, a few of whom had spent their entire lives in Bumph Huck, Georgia. And, as one might expect, they just laughed at me.
“It was a rat snake,” one giggled at me.
“It was a king snake,” chortled another.
Even if it had actually been a rattlesnake, I think the locals would have laughed at me just the same, just because I had the double-whammy affliction of being a city-boy northerner. And then, privately, they would have experienced their own quivering full-body shudders!
The snake never came back.
In a recent post at No Accent Yet, Tiff shared the hilarious tale of her “harrowing” experience with a spider in her car. Unlike Tiff, I’m generally okay with spiders; I just don’t want them crawling on me…or worse.
Tiff’s tale brought up a memory for me of something involving a spider that occurred when I was living in deep southwest Georgia, and then, as a consequence, other memories of funny stuff flooded in. And so, I am inspired to share them here. But not all at once.
As far as I can recall, and as far as I am aware, I have never been in a real life-and-death situation. Okay, well, maybe once. Sure, some may say that, since I often fly commercially, I am putting my life in someone else’s hands… How does that joke go? “When I die, I want to go quietly in my sleep, just like Grampa did; not screaming and crying like his passengers on his bus.”
No. Never really life-and-death. But at least I know that, during her lifetime, Angel, my Dalmatian, was ready to defend me to the best of her abilities.
I had lived in Bumph Huck, Georgia, for just over a year and a half, paying rent beyond what I could afford simply because it was the only place I found that would take a large dog. When I started looking for another place, a co-worker of mine named Bob, a very timid, cowardly man (I am not exaggerating) approached me and said that there was a piece of property owned by his family, which they had rented out in the past. It wasn’t the prettiest structure, but it was on a nice piece of property out in the woods next to a creek. I asked him how much rent he would be asking.
He lowered his head and stammered, “Well, we’ve asked as much as a hundred and fifty dollars.”
My knees nearly buckled as, surely, I was dreaming! “A HUNDRED FIFTY?!”
This was 1996.
Bob cowered a little. “We could ask for less…it’s okay.”
“LESS?” I couldn’t help but shout. “I’ll take it for one-fifty!”
“But you haven’t even seen the place!”
“Bob, right now I’d be glad to live in a cardboard box for one-fifty a month!”
The place was exactly as he had described. Tucked away in the woods behind a pecan orchard, it was a slightly glorified hunter's shack, built of cinder-blocks, and perched atop a sloping bank, with a large, picture-window view to a wide creek below. There was a massive concrete deck wrapped around two sides of it, and the rectangular building was covered with a heavy-beam, lodge-type roof. With the exception of the drab, unpainted cinder-blocks, the house and land were actually quite beautiful!
On Labor Day weekend, with the help of a friend and a co-worker, I moved in. As all moving days are, it had been a long day. Before I could even begin to unpack, the sun sank below the horizon, so I made sure I took care of the important tasks first – I set up my TV and reclining chair in the far corner, opposite the entry door and the kitchen. There was a fireplace on the end where I had set my chair, but Bob had apologetically forbade me using it because the chimney was cracked (the whole house was on a 40-year slide down the hill, so there were fundamental cracks in the concrete). On either side of the fireplace were built-in firewood bins with hinged wooden covers, great for setting things on, like asses and glasses.
The very next day I set to unpacking and setting things out. In the afternoon I took a break to make myself a sandwich and to lunch in my recliner in front of the TV. Angel, the poor soul I had already moved three times before she was three years old, was homesick for the last place, and was constantly expectant that we were going “home” every time I stood up, and would bolt for the car. As I sat and ate, she stood about four feet in front of me and stared at me. When I finished eating and set the plate on the table beside me, she stood and stared at me.
And then I stared at her. All I saw in her eyes was expectation. And then her eyes shifted from mine to the area just to my right.
And she growled.
Angel was a gentle soul; unless we were playing tug with one of her toys, I never heard her growl a serious growl…well, at least until we moved in with the future Mrs. Farrago and her dogs, but that’s another story.
It started very quietly, but it grew louder as her gaze intensified. For a brief moment I thought she was growling at me, since I’d heard it said that you should never stare into a dog’s eyes, which I had been doing. But then I realized she was definitely looking at something to my right and… b e h i n d m e . . .
I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Angel was serious. I turned my head slowly, absolutely clueless as to what she could possibly be looking at. My eyes scanned the wall until they came to rest on something in the corner which hadn't been there before, on top of the wooden bin lid...about three feet away from me. A snake.
S N A K E ! !
The human body is capable of things we can’t possibly envision ourselves doing. How do I know this? I was seated in a soft, comfy reclining chair. I was reclined in this reclining chair. I had leaned forward and my torso was twisted to look at something behind me. The next thing I knew, I was standing behind Angel. I’m certain I flew there. When the quivering full-body shudder stopped I screamed “HOLY SHIT!” …and commenced another quivering full-body shudder.
While I raced frantically around my humble abode to find something with which to kill the snake, Angel stood calmly, quietly, protectively, and watched the snake. I found a baseball bat. I ran to the corner and then I realized that striking at the snake would mean getting to within 34 inches of a LIVE SNAKE! What kind of snake is it? I DON’T KNOW! Is it poisonous? I DON’T KNOW! If I missed it with the bat (I know my own record in baseball all too well!) could it – would it strike at me?
The bat wasn’t a good idea. I didn’t really want to kill the snake anyway, I just didn’t want it to kill me! I ran around for a while more and then I grabbed a can of Raid insect repellent. I didn’t suspect I could kill the snake with Raid, but I could make it really uncomfortable. I sprayed the snake, which then made a mad dash from whence it came, into a separation between the wall of the woodbin and the wall of the house. I sprayed that crack and all of the interior of that woodbin until the can was nearly empty!
After the holiday, when I went back to work, I told my frightening story to some of my co-workers, a few of whom had spent their entire lives in Bumph Huck, Georgia. And, as one might expect, they just laughed at me.
“It was a rat snake,” one giggled at me.
“It was a king snake,” chortled another.
Even if it had actually been a rattlesnake, I think the locals would have laughed at me just the same, just because I had the double-whammy affliction of being a city-boy northerner. And then, privately, they would have experienced their own quivering full-body shudders!
The snake never came back.
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Book Meme, Danno!
Professor tagged everybody with this meme in an effort to embarrass everyone over the amount of classic literature we’ve never read - not to mention some contemporary standouts worth… uh …mentioning, too. And she succeeded. It’s pretty damn embarrassing.
But there it is. And when you get to the bottom, be sure to look and see if you’re one of those I feel like tagging with this one.
Look at the list of books below. Bold the ones you've read. Italicize the ones you want to read. Don't alter the ones that you aren't interested in.
1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown) - atheist that I am, I found this a delectable read!
2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee) - I think I read this for a h.s. assignment…or maybe I just saw the movie?
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown) - minus one glaring error, another delectable read!
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving) - the only Irving I’ve read is Cider House Rules and it blew me away, so I’d definitely read another Irving
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Rowling)
17. Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King) - this one clued me in on the secret…forget his straight horror stuff - Stephen King is simply a fantastic writer!
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling)
20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. The Hobbit (Tolkien)
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger) - not even in school, believe it or don’t!
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte) - UGH! High school required reading. A sure cure for insomnia if I ever saw one! (Professor left no instructions how to label it if you only read some of it!)
28. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom) - heard Mr. Albom speak at one of our clients’ conventions. Good stuff!
31. Dune (Frank Herbert) – I really, really tried to read this one, but never could get through Chapter 1 awake.
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks) - if the movie is half as good as the book, then I don’t need to read it; the movie wrecked me big time!
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34. 1984 (Orwell) - in h.s., though don’t remember much of it
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini) - because Professor gushed about it, so I’s curious
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom) - though, being atheist, and all, I gather the premise of this one would be hard to swallow
45. Bible – have I mentioned the atheist thing, yet?
46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas) - because I love, love, love the sandwich!
48. Angela's Ashes (Frank McCourt) - I heard a lot of buzz about this one
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck) - another h.s. assignment; remember little about it except the retarded guy kills a puppy and doesn’t realize it…and then… a woman? Hmmm. What’s that say about me? I remember the puppy dying, but not sure about a woman…
50. She's Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
53. Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. The Time Traveller's Wife (Audrew Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) - ?? in h.s., maybe?
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. War and Peace (Tolsoy)
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) - I keep hearing more and more about this author…gotta give him a look
67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller) - the movie confused the hell out of me…I only hope the book is better
69. Les Miserables (Hugo)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. Bridget Jones's Diary (Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According To Garp (John Irving)
79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. Charlotte's Web (E.B. White) - when I was a kid…stoopid book made me cry
81. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck) - woops…or was THIS the one with the retarded guy and the puppy and maybe the woman?
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. Wizard's First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down(Richard Adams)
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. Lord of the Flies (Golding) - h.s. again (shiver)
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum) - this one is sitting on my shelf, waiting for me
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton) - I think. In h.s.
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce
The choices to put on this list are seemingly infinite, I realize, but there are some great classics missing, like Dracula (Bram Stoker), for instance. That book was way ahead of its time for its imagery and graphic detail, WAY better than any film, classic or modern, that ever attempted to retell the story. And what about The Green Mile (Stephen King)? I know, it’s not a classic in the… uh …classic sense, but it’s a damn fine read! And I highly recommend The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien.
Have you read this far? TAG! You’re it!
But there it is. And when you get to the bottom, be sure to look and see if you’re one of those I feel like tagging with this one.
Look at the list of books below. Bold the ones you've read. Italicize the ones you want to read. Don't alter the ones that you aren't interested in.
1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown) - atheist that I am, I found this a delectable read!
2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee) - I think I read this for a h.s. assignment…or maybe I just saw the movie?
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown) - minus one glaring error, another delectable read!
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving) - the only Irving I’ve read is Cider House Rules and it blew me away, so I’d definitely read another Irving
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Rowling)
17. Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King) - this one clued me in on the secret…forget his straight horror stuff - Stephen King is simply a fantastic writer!
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling)
20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. The Hobbit (Tolkien)
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger) - not even in school, believe it or don’t!
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte) - UGH! High school required reading. A sure cure for insomnia if I ever saw one! (Professor left no instructions how to label it if you only read some of it!)
28. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom) - heard Mr. Albom speak at one of our clients’ conventions. Good stuff!
31. Dune (Frank Herbert) – I really, really tried to read this one, but never could get through Chapter 1 awake.
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks) - if the movie is half as good as the book, then I don’t need to read it; the movie wrecked me big time!
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34. 1984 (Orwell) - in h.s., though don’t remember much of it
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini) - because Professor gushed about it, so I’s curious
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom) - though, being atheist, and all, I gather the premise of this one would be hard to swallow
45. Bible – have I mentioned the atheist thing, yet?
46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas) - because I love, love, love the sandwich!
48. Angela's Ashes (Frank McCourt) - I heard a lot of buzz about this one
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck) - another h.s. assignment; remember little about it except the retarded guy kills a puppy and doesn’t realize it…and then… a woman? Hmmm. What’s that say about me? I remember the puppy dying, but not sure about a woman…
50. She's Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
53. Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. The Time Traveller's Wife (Audrew Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) - ?? in h.s., maybe?
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. War and Peace (Tolsoy)
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) - I keep hearing more and more about this author…gotta give him a look
67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller) - the movie confused the hell out of me…I only hope the book is better
69. Les Miserables (Hugo)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. Bridget Jones's Diary (Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According To Garp (John Irving)
79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. Charlotte's Web (E.B. White) - when I was a kid…stoopid book made me cry
81. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck) - woops…or was THIS the one with the retarded guy and the puppy and maybe the woman?
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. Wizard's First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down(Richard Adams)
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. Lord of the Flies (Golding) - h.s. again (shiver)
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum) - this one is sitting on my shelf, waiting for me
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton) - I think. In h.s.
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce
The choices to put on this list are seemingly infinite, I realize, but there are some great classics missing, like Dracula (Bram Stoker), for instance. That book was way ahead of its time for its imagery and graphic detail, WAY better than any film, classic or modern, that ever attempted to retell the story. And what about The Green Mile (Stephen King)? I know, it’s not a classic in the… uh …classic sense, but it’s a damn fine read! And I highly recommend The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien.
Have you read this far? TAG! You’re it!
The Flip
In my many hundreds of thousands of miles traveled to many dozens of places across half the globe, I’ve come to observe one constant: omelet chefs.
Despite the many varieties of cuisine and the many schools of culinary thought, by looking at any omelet chef one might think they had all learned at the same cooking school. They all seem to use the same pan, the same burner, the same technique of getting the liquid egg to hit the hot pan and become solid egg…
They make it look easy. Well, they ought to…isn’t it what they do all day? Of course, their most difficult job is probably in the preparation – cutting up all the omelet fixins in order to have them at their fingertips, knowing how much they need on hand for the coming feeding frenzy at whatever hotel or event they’re working.
To me, the most dazzling part of the breakfast-on-the-road ritual is The Flip. In my personal cooking experience, any time the food has left the pan during the actual cooking has meant a serious diversion from the instructions and an emergency clean-up, so to see a chef separate food from pan, to send the food flying into the air on purpose is just enough thrill for me of an early morn! And I'm not the only one; many a fellow on-the-road-omelet-eaters watching with me has made the comment, “Well, if it were me, I’d be cleaning egg off of the floor/ceiling/sink/refrigerator/dog/whatever.” But, like any professional at his or her job, they do make it look easy. Watching any number of chefs do this I’ve only ever seen one botch The Flip, and then it was only a slightly less than perfect execution. He still got it in the pan, with only a few bits of fixins bouncing over the edge of the pan and onto the floor.
More exciting than the omelet flip is the eggs-over-x flip. It’s one thing to flip eggs that have already been scrambled – you don’t have to worry about breaking the yolks. I think it takes just a little more skill to flip eggs with yolks intact and keep them that way when they return to the pan. The typical hotel omelet chef can do this without effort as well.
This morning I decided I wanted 2 eggs, fried, over-medium, which, to you non-egg-eaters, means yolks intact, flipped over so that the egg-white is cooked thoroughly on both sides, but the yolks are still liquid (for dunking the toast!), and there’s no runny, gooey, clear fluid oozing about.
The catch? I’m not on the road.
The omelet chef is me. Is I? Am. is.
I got me these non-stick skillets, one 10-inch, the other 8-inch, at Target shortly after I moved into my apartment. Following the example of The Omelet Chef I’ve seen hundreds of times, now, I set the 8-incher on the stove (though I think The Omelet Chef uses a smaller one, even), fired up the gas and threw in a pat of butter. I cracked the eggs into a bowl, and when the butter was melted and bubbling in the pan, I deposited the eggs into it.
I perhaps had the flame a little too high, the pan a little too hot, so the whites turned white pretty quickly. I swished the pan around a little just to make sure the eggs were not sticking. Since I always seem to wait too long to turn the eggs I cook, I made a conscious effort to ignore the internal admonition to wait a little while longer. I took the pan and mentally prepared myself for The Flip. I turned and held the pan over the sink (it’s great to have confidence, idnit?). I’d flipped scrambled before, but with a slightly sticky pan that was a little too big, to mixed results.
I dipped the forward edge of the pan down and, just as the eggs slid toward the edge, I lifted and leveled the pan quickly. The eggs went up about six inches and came down… exactly as they had been when they left the pan – sunny-side up. No flip.
Next attempt. Forward edge down. Come on Farrago, this is easy. Eggs slid to the edge. You can do it, boy! Pan up! Eggs up! And…
SUCCESS! I had completed The Flip, no emergency clean-up necessary, both yolks intact! Just a few more seconds back on the heat, and then I plated the eggs.
As a meal, it was so-so. I still don’t have a toaster, so I dunked cold, “raw” bread. The eggs themselves were okay – they indeed could have used a little more time on a slightly lower flame, but they looked and smelled great!
So, am I ready to tackle a cheese soufflé?
Nah. I’ll stick with flippin’ eggs for a while.
Despite the many varieties of cuisine and the many schools of culinary thought, by looking at any omelet chef one might think they had all learned at the same cooking school. They all seem to use the same pan, the same burner, the same technique of getting the liquid egg to hit the hot pan and become solid egg…
They make it look easy. Well, they ought to…isn’t it what they do all day? Of course, their most difficult job is probably in the preparation – cutting up all the omelet fixins in order to have them at their fingertips, knowing how much they need on hand for the coming feeding frenzy at whatever hotel or event they’re working.
To me, the most dazzling part of the breakfast-on-the-road ritual is The Flip. In my personal cooking experience, any time the food has left the pan during the actual cooking has meant a serious diversion from the instructions and an emergency clean-up, so to see a chef separate food from pan, to send the food flying into the air on purpose is just enough thrill for me of an early morn! And I'm not the only one; many a fellow on-the-road-omelet-eaters watching with me has made the comment, “Well, if it were me, I’d be cleaning egg off of the floor/ceiling/sink/refrigerator/dog/whatever.” But, like any professional at his or her job, they do make it look easy. Watching any number of chefs do this I’ve only ever seen one botch The Flip, and then it was only a slightly less than perfect execution. He still got it in the pan, with only a few bits of fixins bouncing over the edge of the pan and onto the floor.
More exciting than the omelet flip is the eggs-over-x flip. It’s one thing to flip eggs that have already been scrambled – you don’t have to worry about breaking the yolks. I think it takes just a little more skill to flip eggs with yolks intact and keep them that way when they return to the pan. The typical hotel omelet chef can do this without effort as well.
This morning I decided I wanted 2 eggs, fried, over-medium, which, to you non-egg-eaters, means yolks intact, flipped over so that the egg-white is cooked thoroughly on both sides, but the yolks are still liquid (for dunking the toast!), and there’s no runny, gooey, clear fluid oozing about.
The catch? I’m not on the road.
The omelet chef is me. Is I? Am. is.
I got me these non-stick skillets, one 10-inch, the other 8-inch, at Target shortly after I moved into my apartment. Following the example of The Omelet Chef I’ve seen hundreds of times, now, I set the 8-incher on the stove (though I think The Omelet Chef uses a smaller one, even), fired up the gas and threw in a pat of butter. I cracked the eggs into a bowl, and when the butter was melted and bubbling in the pan, I deposited the eggs into it.
I perhaps had the flame a little too high, the pan a little too hot, so the whites turned white pretty quickly. I swished the pan around a little just to make sure the eggs were not sticking. Since I always seem to wait too long to turn the eggs I cook, I made a conscious effort to ignore the internal admonition to wait a little while longer. I took the pan and mentally prepared myself for The Flip. I turned and held the pan over the sink (it’s great to have confidence, idnit?). I’d flipped scrambled before, but with a slightly sticky pan that was a little too big, to mixed results.
I dipped the forward edge of the pan down and, just as the eggs slid toward the edge, I lifted and leveled the pan quickly. The eggs went up about six inches and came down… exactly as they had been when they left the pan – sunny-side up. No flip.
Next attempt. Forward edge down. Come on Farrago, this is easy. Eggs slid to the edge. You can do it, boy! Pan up! Eggs up! And…
SUCCESS! I had completed The Flip, no emergency clean-up necessary, both yolks intact! Just a few more seconds back on the heat, and then I plated the eggs.
As a meal, it was so-so. I still don’t have a toaster, so I dunked cold, “raw” bread. The eggs themselves were okay – they indeed could have used a little more time on a slightly lower flame, but they looked and smelled great!
So, am I ready to tackle a cheese soufflé?
Nah. I’ll stick with flippin’ eggs for a while.
First Attempt at Wordsmiths (click here)
Roar
“Hello, Dali,” he heard himself say. Janus looked around as his voice reverberated briefly in the oak paneled gallery to make sure no one else heard him. He had been talking to himself a lot lately, ever since the accident. No one heard him. Or if they did, they didn’t care to acknowledge it.
Now that his wife was finally dead, Janus could get out and do things again. That was a horrible way to put it, he thought, but that’s how it crossed his mind. The coma, the respirator, the hours of talking to Miriam with no response, not even a twitch, had taken its toll on him. The so-called quiet moments, with the maddening cadence of the machine, its tube down her throat, filling her lungs with air, and then letting gravity force the air back out, haunted his wretched sleep.
And when she was gone… well, she was gone months before – drained from the body like some precious fluid… but when the heart that had owned him stopped beating despite the doctors’ best efforts, and they had shut off the machinery and the electronics, and they had left him alone to spend a few last moments with the body that, dead, looked no different than it had looked alive for the prior months, true silence rushed in with a roar that frightened him.
And then, after so many months of effort to keep her alive, everyone suddenly seemed terribly eager to bury her, as if to hide their mistakes, or their mistaken belief that they could save her, despite the months-long gray line drawn on the black monitor screen suspended above her bed.
And as Janus had quieted the clatter and wheeze of the respirator with his own voice, so did he quiet the roar.
He stared at the Dali. “Interesting,” he said aloud, again to no one’s ears but his own. Interesting indeed that he would venture out for the first time in months and, on a whim, divert into the art museum, and wind up here.
Warrior, the placard read.
Janus identified with him – the gaunt face, the distant, tired eyes that reflected… what? The faces of those he conquered? Of the one? Of her?
Janus looked around again. Had he said that out loud?
“No, I didn’t,” he said out loud.
But fear gripped him. He backed away from the painting. Could others read his face as he had read the Warrior’s? He had fought long and hard. He had survived. Could they see her in his eyes? Could they see the freedom he saw, at the top of the ladder on the other side of the door, in the crimped hose clenched in his fist?
“You were a fraud, Dali!” The sound of his voice reverberating in the gallery made Janus aware he had shouted, to the dismay of the others who heard him.
Janus fled to his home where he fought to drown out the silence with his own voice.
“Hello, Dali,” he heard himself say. Janus looked around as his voice reverberated briefly in the oak paneled gallery to make sure no one else heard him. He had been talking to himself a lot lately, ever since the accident. No one heard him. Or if they did, they didn’t care to acknowledge it.
Now that his wife was finally dead, Janus could get out and do things again. That was a horrible way to put it, he thought, but that’s how it crossed his mind. The coma, the respirator, the hours of talking to Miriam with no response, not even a twitch, had taken its toll on him. The so-called quiet moments, with the maddening cadence of the machine, its tube down her throat, filling her lungs with air, and then letting gravity force the air back out, haunted his wretched sleep.
And when she was gone… well, she was gone months before – drained from the body like some precious fluid… but when the heart that had owned him stopped beating despite the doctors’ best efforts, and they had shut off the machinery and the electronics, and they had left him alone to spend a few last moments with the body that, dead, looked no different than it had looked alive for the prior months, true silence rushed in with a roar that frightened him.
And then, after so many months of effort to keep her alive, everyone suddenly seemed terribly eager to bury her, as if to hide their mistakes, or their mistaken belief that they could save her, despite the months-long gray line drawn on the black monitor screen suspended above her bed.
And as Janus had quieted the clatter and wheeze of the respirator with his own voice, so did he quiet the roar.
He stared at the Dali. “Interesting,” he said aloud, again to no one’s ears but his own. Interesting indeed that he would venture out for the first time in months and, on a whim, divert into the art museum, and wind up here.
Warrior, the placard read.
Janus identified with him – the gaunt face, the distant, tired eyes that reflected… what? The faces of those he conquered? Of the one? Of her?
Janus looked around again. Had he said that out loud?
“No, I didn’t,” he said out loud.
But fear gripped him. He backed away from the painting. Could others read his face as he had read the Warrior’s? He had fought long and hard. He had survived. Could they see her in his eyes? Could they see the freedom he saw, at the top of the ladder on the other side of the door, in the crimped hose clenched in his fist?
“You were a fraud, Dali!” The sound of his voice reverberating in the gallery made Janus aware he had shouted, to the dismay of the others who heard him.
Janus fled to his home where he fought to drown out the silence with his own voice.
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
November, As Intended
It’s rare when a day as gray as today was here in Chicago can fill a soul with joy and excitement. No gifts arrived. No unexpected loved ones showed up. Nothing special happened really, other than the true arrival of autumn.
If ever there is supposed to be a day like today, it is in the month of November. It was as if the dreary clouds descended upon the earth like they were tired of flying and needed a rest. Everything was lightly wet and cast in misty shades of gray, lending the feeling that I existed for the day in a Frank Capra movie. What bright colors did dare to shine were decisively muted by the mood of the fog.
Chicago – all of the upper Midwest – is a four-season place. They transmogrify almost seemingly to suit the desires of us fickle humans: in winter, when we’re fed up with the cold and snow, it all changes; in the spring it’s not getting warm fast enough; in the summer it’s just too damn hot! And now, fall, in all its glory, has arrived just in time.
Oh, sure, the leaves all turned colors weeks ago, but that’s just their final fanfare, their fancy farewell before they abandon the trees and head “south” for the winter, leaving them as we’ll see them for several more months. Bare trees in bright sunlight just don’t look right. A naked tree needs a blank, gray sky behind it to accentuate its stark exposure, to bring home the point that winter’s coming, and winters in the Midwest are cold and snowy and unforgiving, the way winter is supposed to be, and if you don’t like it, if you want trees to be green and happy and pretty all the time, then you need to move to Costa Rica or some steamy tropical place like that.
Just keep your eyes peeled for anacondas and those flies that drink the mucus from your eye sockets and lay eggs in your skin.
If ever there is supposed to be a day like today, it is in the month of November. It was as if the dreary clouds descended upon the earth like they were tired of flying and needed a rest. Everything was lightly wet and cast in misty shades of gray, lending the feeling that I existed for the day in a Frank Capra movie. What bright colors did dare to shine were decisively muted by the mood of the fog.
Chicago – all of the upper Midwest – is a four-season place. They transmogrify almost seemingly to suit the desires of us fickle humans: in winter, when we’re fed up with the cold and snow, it all changes; in the spring it’s not getting warm fast enough; in the summer it’s just too damn hot! And now, fall, in all its glory, has arrived just in time.
Oh, sure, the leaves all turned colors weeks ago, but that’s just their final fanfare, their fancy farewell before they abandon the trees and head “south” for the winter, leaving them as we’ll see them for several more months. Bare trees in bright sunlight just don’t look right. A naked tree needs a blank, gray sky behind it to accentuate its stark exposure, to bring home the point that winter’s coming, and winters in the Midwest are cold and snowy and unforgiving, the way winter is supposed to be, and if you don’t like it, if you want trees to be green and happy and pretty all the time, then you need to move to Costa Rica or some steamy tropical place like that.
Just keep your eyes peeled for anacondas and those flies that drink the mucus from your eye sockets and lay eggs in your skin.
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Reuniting and Reminiscing: A Weekend of Looking Back
This weekend brought something that I had been anticipating for 5 years, and looking forward to for about 6 weeks. Because just about everyone my age is in the midst of trying to raise 2.3 healthy children with their heads screwed on straight, or trying to secure as much capital to sustain them in their Golden Years when Social Security has been cashed out by the politicians, nobody in my high school graduating class was interested in taking on the daunting task of organizing our 25-year class reunion.
But then, sometime in the middle of September I received a notice in an e-mail that we were having an informal, unofficial, hastily assembled reunion on November 10. WOO HOO!
It was held at a sports bar down in the same Chicago south suburb where we all attended high school, a bar which, as it turns out, is co-owned by one of our classmates!
I can’t even begin to describe the joy of seeing so many familiar faces, as well as some faces not so familiar until I read the name tags! There were a couple of people there who had missed the 10- and the 20-year reunions, so it was doubly fun to see them for the first time in 25 years.
As I now live approximately 55 miles from the town where I grew up, and I was certain that I would leave the venue at a late hour, and there was likely to be more than a little alcohol on my breath, I decided to make a weekend of it. I booked a hotel room in the area and planned to spend the night there after the reunion, and then to spend Sunday visiting my father, who is living in a nursing home.
And that’s just how it worked out, except I didn’t exactly spend the night in the hotel room, but more like the morning, as I didn’t get back into my room until a little past 3:30 a.m!
The good thing was that check-out time was noon, and a mere 30 steps away (give or take) from the hotel is a honkin’ huge Cracker Barrel Restaurant! Another good thing was that in eight hours of partying, I drank a grand total of three beers, so the only thing threatening my drive back to the hotel was fatigue…and the freak November thunderstorm that struck while I drove, and there wasn’t even a hint of hangover.
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I slept in just a little this morning, arising around 9:40am. Breakfast at Cracker Barrel was quick and yummy, and soon I was checked out and on the road to visit Dad. Since I was in another suburb a few miles west of where the reunion was held, I followed a different route than I usually would follow to get to Dad’s.
I’ve driven down Illinois Route 50 certainly hundreds of times throughout my life. And if I go far enough south, through and past the town of Monee (pronounced moe-NEE), heading toward Peotone (pronounced PEE-uh-TONE), my mind fires to life with childhood memories. Mom had an aunt and uncle who owned a farm just off of Route 50, where they raised pigs and chicken (and probably more, but all I remember are the pigs and chickens) and, during the summer, especially, Dad and Mom, just about once every two weeks, would throw two or three of us kids in the back seat, and we’d ride through just a little bit of country until we got to the farm. I’m sure Mom got the family discount on eggs, as we always returned home with about three-dozen!
If my life depended on it, I couldn’t find that farm again today…if it even still exists. I don’t remember which road it’s on from Route 50, or even how far to go along that road.
But there’s another memory along Route 50, one that is more precious and more vivid than any of the rides to the “egg farm.”
With Dad off on Mondays, he would often lift the burden of watching me on summer days from one of my siblings – as Mom had gone back to work – and take me with him on his errands and visits to friends around town. Every couple of weeks it was to Joliet, where he would get his hair cut by the barber under whom he had apprenticed. Other times it was off to the junkyard to drop off brass and copper he had scavenged or had collected from handyman jobs he had done for friends around town. Once in a while we picked up barber supplies.
But one particular Monday morning – I was around age eight or nine, my best guess – he said to me, “Let’s go fishin’.” I climbed into his blue Ford F-150 pickup truck and watched our little world go by as he worked through the gears of the “three on a tree” to get the truck up to speed and out to Illinois Route 50.
We hummed along the Route for a few minutes and then he pulled to the side of the four-lane road, essentially in the middle of farmland. I looked around and asked, “What’s wrong?”
Dad just said, “We’re here.”
I climbed down out of the truck and looked around. There was no lake or pond to be seen in any direction.
“We’re where?”
“Just follow me,” said Dad, and I did.
He grabbed the poles and handed me the can of earthworms we had picked up at a bait shop, and he led me away from the pavement and into the tall grass beside the road, down the embankment and into a small gulley, actually a dry creek bed that bent and ducked under the road. He pointed in the direction away from the road and said, “Through there.”
I looked to where he was pointing and saw what, to me at that time, was one of the coolest sights ever: a concrete spillway underneath a concrete arch bridge supporting the Illinois Central Railroad over the creek – only I didn’t know those things then. It was just the coolest thing!
“I hope there’s water back there,” he said as he ambled over the loose river rocks.
In the moment, I took him to mean that he had never been there before, and that we were both discovering it together. But since then, I realize it’s possible that he wasn’t sure if it was as dry back there as the creek bed where we stood. I followed him through the tunnel formed by the archway, over the smooth concrete floor. Out the other side I saw that there was a small pond and, at my feet, a ledge where I could sit and dangle my legs over the water while our bobbers stood sentry over our worms dying below, savage hooks rammed through their bodies, and drowning to add the final insult to their injury. The water was clear enough to see minnows and the occasional larger small fish swimming around near the shallows and near our ledge, so Dad was encouraged and confident we’d catch something.
Dad had even packed a lunch – his favorite, and sometimes mine – hard salami on buttered Italian bread.
We did catch a few fish that day, but they were all tiny and not worth taking home. We left empty-handed though not unhappy, but I unwittingly brought with me a memory I would have, it turns out, for a lifetime.
On Sunday, as I passed through the other side of Monee, those memories along Illinois Route 50 fired up again. I drove past what I thought might be the turnoff to the “egg farm,” and, as the landscape rolled under me, my surroundings told me I was close to that special spot to where Dad had brought me that fine summer day so long ago.
I had tried to find it once before, one summer day; I think heavy foliage on the side of the road had obscured it from view and, at 55 miles per hour…or faster…I just missed it. But today, since November has stripped the trees of their camouflage, after doubting such an idyllic spot could remain after so many years, I was able to spot the tunnel with ease!
I drove on past it, but nostalgia nagged at me to turn back, to gaze upon the archway, to take photos with the camera I had brought with me to capture reunion shots! So I did. I returned, finally, to the spot that has decorated my memories like cherished photos in an oft-opened shoebox.
I stood on the bridge that carries the cars over the creek, and I gazed upon the hole beneath the train tracks.
I was in no hurry. Dad didn’t know I was on my way to see him. Nothing else was on my agenda. So down the embankment I went!
The creek bed was dry – the past summer’s drought had probably kept it dry for months. I ambled over perhaps the very same individual rocks Dad’s and my shoes had touched those 35 years ago!
I walked through the tunnel and came out the other side and… it’s exactly the same! My educated and experienced eye updated my memory and I now understand that the pond where we caught and tossed back a handful of fish is actually a sort of flood basin. The embankment beyond the pond shows evidence of some quite fierce water flow where man -- long before Dad and I were there -- has manipulated the earth to forcibly divert the creek through the tunnel, under the rail bed, under the roadway, and off through the farmland. In the spring, this is probably a very dangerous place to be!
I don’t remember the strangely constructed pipeworks, evidently drainage from somewhere, and the water appears now to be quite filthy. I saw no fish swimming about. It could be contaminated by pollution, or it could just be that the pond spent too much time unrefreshed by rains and creek flow, and its population went extinct in the stagnant water.
But it’s still there! That idyllic spot from my memory exists relatively intact! Autumn has taken away most of the foliage, and today’s gray November sky painted everything in drab, but physically, the spot is exactly as I remember it.
I drove on to visit Dad at the nursing home. He’s 84 now. His condition may not have worsened, but he certainly hasn’t improved. His mind is still pretty sharp, but he doesn’t recall the day he took me fishing in that secret, special spot so many years back, not even after I showed him the photos.
I’m neither surprised nor upset that he doesn’t remember it, or that it didn’t resonate with him as such a monumentally special, memorable moment with his youngest child. That day I think he just wanted to catch some fish!
The funny part of it all is that I can’t stand fishing. I’ve always hated it.
But I love my dad. And that day was a perfect, golden, special time for me, with him.
But then, sometime in the middle of September I received a notice in an e-mail that we were having an informal, unofficial, hastily assembled reunion on November 10. WOO HOO!
It was held at a sports bar down in the same Chicago south suburb where we all attended high school, a bar which, as it turns out, is co-owned by one of our classmates!
I can’t even begin to describe the joy of seeing so many familiar faces, as well as some faces not so familiar until I read the name tags! There were a couple of people there who had missed the 10- and the 20-year reunions, so it was doubly fun to see them for the first time in 25 years.
As I now live approximately 55 miles from the town where I grew up, and I was certain that I would leave the venue at a late hour, and there was likely to be more than a little alcohol on my breath, I decided to make a weekend of it. I booked a hotel room in the area and planned to spend the night there after the reunion, and then to spend Sunday visiting my father, who is living in a nursing home.
And that’s just how it worked out, except I didn’t exactly spend the night in the hotel room, but more like the morning, as I didn’t get back into my room until a little past 3:30 a.m!
The good thing was that check-out time was noon, and a mere 30 steps away (give or take) from the hotel is a honkin’ huge Cracker Barrel Restaurant! Another good thing was that in eight hours of partying, I drank a grand total of three beers, so the only thing threatening my drive back to the hotel was fatigue…and the freak November thunderstorm that struck while I drove, and there wasn’t even a hint of hangover.
•------••------••------••------••------••------••------••------••------••------••------••------•
I slept in just a little this morning, arising around 9:40am. Breakfast at Cracker Barrel was quick and yummy, and soon I was checked out and on the road to visit Dad. Since I was in another suburb a few miles west of where the reunion was held, I followed a different route than I usually would follow to get to Dad’s.
I’ve driven down Illinois Route 50 certainly hundreds of times throughout my life. And if I go far enough south, through and past the town of Monee (pronounced moe-NEE), heading toward Peotone (pronounced PEE-uh-TONE), my mind fires to life with childhood memories. Mom had an aunt and uncle who owned a farm just off of Route 50, where they raised pigs and chicken (and probably more, but all I remember are the pigs and chickens) and, during the summer, especially, Dad and Mom, just about once every two weeks, would throw two or three of us kids in the back seat, and we’d ride through just a little bit of country until we got to the farm. I’m sure Mom got the family discount on eggs, as we always returned home with about three-dozen!
If my life depended on it, I couldn’t find that farm again today…if it even still exists. I don’t remember which road it’s on from Route 50, or even how far to go along that road.
But there’s another memory along Route 50, one that is more precious and more vivid than any of the rides to the “egg farm.”
With Dad off on Mondays, he would often lift the burden of watching me on summer days from one of my siblings – as Mom had gone back to work – and take me with him on his errands and visits to friends around town. Every couple of weeks it was to Joliet, where he would get his hair cut by the barber under whom he had apprenticed. Other times it was off to the junkyard to drop off brass and copper he had scavenged or had collected from handyman jobs he had done for friends around town. Once in a while we picked up barber supplies.
But one particular Monday morning – I was around age eight or nine, my best guess – he said to me, “Let’s go fishin’.” I climbed into his blue Ford F-150 pickup truck and watched our little world go by as he worked through the gears of the “three on a tree” to get the truck up to speed and out to Illinois Route 50.
We hummed along the Route for a few minutes and then he pulled to the side of the four-lane road, essentially in the middle of farmland. I looked around and asked, “What’s wrong?”
Dad just said, “We’re here.”
I climbed down out of the truck and looked around. There was no lake or pond to be seen in any direction.
“We’re where?”
“Just follow me,” said Dad, and I did.
He grabbed the poles and handed me the can of earthworms we had picked up at a bait shop, and he led me away from the pavement and into the tall grass beside the road, down the embankment and into a small gulley, actually a dry creek bed that bent and ducked under the road. He pointed in the direction away from the road and said, “Through there.”
I looked to where he was pointing and saw what, to me at that time, was one of the coolest sights ever: a concrete spillway underneath a concrete arch bridge supporting the Illinois Central Railroad over the creek – only I didn’t know those things then. It was just the coolest thing!
“I hope there’s water back there,” he said as he ambled over the loose river rocks.
In the moment, I took him to mean that he had never been there before, and that we were both discovering it together. But since then, I realize it’s possible that he wasn’t sure if it was as dry back there as the creek bed where we stood. I followed him through the tunnel formed by the archway, over the smooth concrete floor. Out the other side I saw that there was a small pond and, at my feet, a ledge where I could sit and dangle my legs over the water while our bobbers stood sentry over our worms dying below, savage hooks rammed through their bodies, and drowning to add the final insult to their injury. The water was clear enough to see minnows and the occasional larger small fish swimming around near the shallows and near our ledge, so Dad was encouraged and confident we’d catch something.
Dad had even packed a lunch – his favorite, and sometimes mine – hard salami on buttered Italian bread.
We did catch a few fish that day, but they were all tiny and not worth taking home. We left empty-handed though not unhappy, but I unwittingly brought with me a memory I would have, it turns out, for a lifetime.
On Sunday, as I passed through the other side of Monee, those memories along Illinois Route 50 fired up again. I drove past what I thought might be the turnoff to the “egg farm,” and, as the landscape rolled under me, my surroundings told me I was close to that special spot to where Dad had brought me that fine summer day so long ago.
I had tried to find it once before, one summer day; I think heavy foliage on the side of the road had obscured it from view and, at 55 miles per hour…or faster…I just missed it. But today, since November has stripped the trees of their camouflage, after doubting such an idyllic spot could remain after so many years, I was able to spot the tunnel with ease!
I drove on past it, but nostalgia nagged at me to turn back, to gaze upon the archway, to take photos with the camera I had brought with me to capture reunion shots! So I did. I returned, finally, to the spot that has decorated my memories like cherished photos in an oft-opened shoebox.
I stood on the bridge that carries the cars over the creek, and I gazed upon the hole beneath the train tracks.
I was in no hurry. Dad didn’t know I was on my way to see him. Nothing else was on my agenda. So down the embankment I went!
The creek bed was dry – the past summer’s drought had probably kept it dry for months. I ambled over perhaps the very same individual rocks Dad’s and my shoes had touched those 35 years ago!
I walked through the tunnel and came out the other side and… it’s exactly the same! My educated and experienced eye updated my memory and I now understand that the pond where we caught and tossed back a handful of fish is actually a sort of flood basin. The embankment beyond the pond shows evidence of some quite fierce water flow where man -- long before Dad and I were there -- has manipulated the earth to forcibly divert the creek through the tunnel, under the rail bed, under the roadway, and off through the farmland. In the spring, this is probably a very dangerous place to be!
I don’t remember the strangely constructed pipeworks, evidently drainage from somewhere, and the water appears now to be quite filthy. I saw no fish swimming about. It could be contaminated by pollution, or it could just be that the pond spent too much time unrefreshed by rains and creek flow, and its population went extinct in the stagnant water.
But it’s still there! That idyllic spot from my memory exists relatively intact! Autumn has taken away most of the foliage, and today’s gray November sky painted everything in drab, but physically, the spot is exactly as I remember it.
I drove on to visit Dad at the nursing home. He’s 84 now. His condition may not have worsened, but he certainly hasn’t improved. His mind is still pretty sharp, but he doesn’t recall the day he took me fishing in that secret, special spot so many years back, not even after I showed him the photos.
I’m neither surprised nor upset that he doesn’t remember it, or that it didn’t resonate with him as such a monumentally special, memorable moment with his youngest child. That day I think he just wanted to catch some fish!
The funny part of it all is that I can’t stand fishing. I’ve always hated it.
But I love my dad. And that day was a perfect, golden, special time for me, with him.
Tuesday, November 06, 2007
Movie Meme
It’s been a while since anybody’s tagged me, but tagged I am – this time by Professor. This one was tough for me because I can probably count on two hands the number of movies I’ve watched in the last two years. I know there are movies that have really reached me throughout my life, but I’ll be damned if I can remember the best ones. Well, here goes, and remember to pop on over to check out what Professor has to say at her blog.
Popcorn or Candy?
Popcorn. Candy you can buy anywhere, for lots cheaper. Popcorn anywhere other than the theater you have to make, or nuke, or buy cold with fake “butter flavor” powder on it, which just doesn’t get the popcorn all marvelously soggy four to twenty hours later when your lips are no longer numb from the salt and you’re ready for more snackin’!
Name a movie you’ve been meaning to see forever.
Deep Thro… no, wait… American Pie. Everyone I’ve spoken to who’s seen that flick has told me I’m an idiot for not having seen it…even people over the age of 15 have told me this. Some have told me I'm an idiot without even mentioning a movie…. Hmmmm….
Steal one costume from a movie for your wardrobe.
I guess it would have to be the fedora and leather jacket Harrison Ford wore in the Indiana Jones films, because I already have the gingham dress and the ruby slippers from The Wizar... oops. Next Question?
Your favorite film franchise is…
Jeez, I don’t know. I guess I’d have to go with the Star Wars saga, though I’d have to say that the Bourne films and the Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen movies are close behind.*
Invite five movie characters over for dinner. Who are they? Why’d you invite them? What do you feed them?
1) Mary Hatch because she’s so sweet and pretty and, well, that phone call with George Bailey and Sam Wainright is the hottest love scene shot from the shoulders up EVER!
2) Tia Russell, because I finally saw that movie a few weeks ago after it had been out only 17 years(!) and I absolutely fell in love with her. Please disregard the whole she-was-only-17-when-she-made-the-movie thing… she’s staying after dinner is over and everyone else has left…except Mary Hatch!
3) Frank Bullitt because after dinner he’s gonna let me take his 1968 Ford Mustang Fastback for one helluva spin …with Tia Russell and Mary Hatch! And then he's leaving!
4) Willy Wonka, because I want to see how long it takes before Frank Bullitt punches his lights out.
5) Professor Julius Kelp/Buddy Love, and I want him to bring his potion along with him and take it so we can all see his transformation. Also, I want him to bring enough potion for all of us just so we can see what each of us becomes after taking it.
I’m taking everyone to White Castle because I know everybody will like it (except, maybe, Tia Russell, but she and I will discuss that after dinner ;D ). Besides, if I cook for everyone, someone’ll be dead before morning.
What is the appropriate punishment for people who answer cell phones in the movie theater?
Bean him/her/them repeatedly in the back of the head with Ju-Ju-Bees or Sno-Caps (keeping the popcorn in my bucket where it belongs (see paragraph above).
Choose a female bodyguard:
Hmmm. “Large Marge”? Or Owen’s momma? Or Angelina Jolie? Oh, what I could do with those lips! I’m gonna have to go with Angelina Jolie on this one, and I’ll be a most inappropriate employer!
What’s the scariest thing you’ve ever seen in a movie?
Stephen Hawking.
Your favorite genre (excluding “comedy” and “drama” ):
Action-Adventure
You are given the power to greenlight movies at a major studio for one year.
A few of… ah, hell! ALL of my own story ideas are developed, completed and released. Tom Hanks is doing silly comedy again. Drew Barrymore, Tom Cruise and Vin Diesel (to name a few) are out of work, as they should be. The formula for action-adventure is thrown out the window and re-invented. The studio loses a TON of money, and I’m run out of town on a rail. But I have fun while it lasts, and why not? It’s all about me, right?
Bonnie or Clyde?
Are we talking the real Bonnie, or as played by Faye Dunaway? Point’s moot, ‘cause I ain’t taking Clyde under any circumstances.
***---***---***---***---***---***
Okay, if you're reading this, you're tagged...unless you're Professor or one of the others she tagged with this meme. Git writin'!
*I’m only kidding. I only meant Mary Kate and Ashley.
Popcorn or Candy?
Popcorn. Candy you can buy anywhere, for lots cheaper. Popcorn anywhere other than the theater you have to make, or nuke, or buy cold with fake “butter flavor” powder on it, which just doesn’t get the popcorn all marvelously soggy four to twenty hours later when your lips are no longer numb from the salt and you’re ready for more snackin’!
Name a movie you’ve been meaning to see forever.
Deep Thro… no, wait… American Pie. Everyone I’ve spoken to who’s seen that flick has told me I’m an idiot for not having seen it…even people over the age of 15 have told me this. Some have told me I'm an idiot without even mentioning a movie…. Hmmmm….
Steal one costume from a movie for your wardrobe.
I guess it would have to be the fedora and leather jacket Harrison Ford wore in the Indiana Jones films, because I already have the gingham dress and the ruby slippers from The Wizar... oops. Next Question?
Your favorite film franchise is…
Jeez, I don’t know. I guess I’d have to go with the Star Wars saga, though I’d have to say that the Bourne films and the Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen movies are close behind.*
Invite five movie characters over for dinner. Who are they? Why’d you invite them? What do you feed them?
1) Mary Hatch because she’s so sweet and pretty and, well, that phone call with George Bailey and Sam Wainright is the hottest love scene shot from the shoulders up EVER!
2) Tia Russell, because I finally saw that movie a few weeks ago after it had been out only 17 years(!) and I absolutely fell in love with her. Please disregard the whole she-was-only-17-when-she-made-the-movie thing… she’s staying after dinner is over and everyone else has left…except Mary Hatch!
3) Frank Bullitt because after dinner he’s gonna let me take his 1968 Ford Mustang Fastback for one helluva spin …with Tia Russell and Mary Hatch! And then he's leaving!
4) Willy Wonka, because I want to see how long it takes before Frank Bullitt punches his lights out.
5) Professor Julius Kelp/Buddy Love, and I want him to bring his potion along with him and take it so we can all see his transformation. Also, I want him to bring enough potion for all of us just so we can see what each of us becomes after taking it.
I’m taking everyone to White Castle because I know everybody will like it (except, maybe, Tia Russell, but she and I will discuss that after dinner ;D ). Besides, if I cook for everyone, someone’ll be dead before morning.
What is the appropriate punishment for people who answer cell phones in the movie theater?
Bean him/her/them repeatedly in the back of the head with Ju-Ju-Bees or Sno-Caps (keeping the popcorn in my bucket where it belongs (see paragraph above).
Choose a female bodyguard:
Hmmm. “Large Marge”? Or Owen’s momma? Or Angelina Jolie? Oh, what I could do with those lips! I’m gonna have to go with Angelina Jolie on this one, and I’ll be a most inappropriate employer!
What’s the scariest thing you’ve ever seen in a movie?
Stephen Hawking.
Your favorite genre (excluding “comedy” and “drama” ):
Action-Adventure
You are given the power to greenlight movies at a major studio for one year.
A few of… ah, hell! ALL of my own story ideas are developed, completed and released. Tom Hanks is doing silly comedy again. Drew Barrymore, Tom Cruise and Vin Diesel (to name a few) are out of work, as they should be. The formula for action-adventure is thrown out the window and re-invented. The studio loses a TON of money, and I’m run out of town on a rail. But I have fun while it lasts, and why not? It’s all about me, right?
Bonnie or Clyde?
Are we talking the real Bonnie, or as played by Faye Dunaway? Point’s moot, ‘cause I ain’t taking Clyde under any circumstances.
***---***---***---***---***---***
Okay, if you're reading this, you're tagged...unless you're Professor or one of the others she tagged with this meme. Git writin'!
*I’m only kidding. I only meant Mary Kate and Ashley.
Saturday, November 03, 2007
The Other Way
When I was a kid we rarely all went somewhere together. As a family of seven children on our budget, we couldn’t possibly have fit all the kids in our one car without someone killing someone else.
On those rare occasions that a portion of us did pile into the car, it was always Dad at the wheel. Mom never had a driver’s license until 1973 – when she was 45 years old – so I’m sure it was an unspoken mistrust of her driving skills, as well as her preference, that placed Dad behind the wheel.
I don’t know if it’s something that comes with age, or at a certain specific age, but Dad never seemed to be in much of a hurry to get anywhere. He has spoken of the foolish things he did as a young man involving cars and excessive speed, but by the time I, “The Caboose,” came along there was nothing left of that foolish young man, and we made our way to every destination at or below the posted speed limit.
Even worse, Dad never liked to use the “expressways,” as they’re known here in the Midwest. Much to my sisters’ chagrin, no matter the distance to a destination, certainly if it was local, Dad would chart a course on the map in his brain for the “back roads” route, usually the most direct – but not the quickest – way to get there.
*** *** *** ***
Each of us spends the first twenty to twenty five years of life refuting the observations of others about how much we look like or take after either or both of our parents. But then we say or do something that drives home the crux of all those third-party observations: we do look like and take after one or both of our progenitors!
I first noticed it in myself when I saw a photo taken of me while helping to dig a drainage trench around my unit’s 13-man tent while on a military exercise in Germany. I was bent over my ridiculously inadequate entrenching tool and pushing its blade into the earth with my foot. My image was frozen on film, hunched over in profile. And there, at the age of 20, I saw both the resemblance to and a trait of my father: in my effort and concentration, I was pursing my lips just like my father does, and I looked EXACTLY like him (except my nose had not (and still has not (yet)) expanded to the proportions of his nose)!
It was one of those rare moments this morning as I drove to Whole Foods Market, a blank-mind moment when thoughts are flying freely in and out while the brain handles the primary task of avoiding the oncoming traffic and the idiots whose brains aren’t working properly. Earlier I had consulted Google Maps for the route to get to Whole Foods Market and, though it recommended I get right on I-90 and take it east to Illinois Route 53, and then take that north to Rand Road, I opted instead to take Barrington Road all the way up to Dundee Road, and then Dundee Road east to Rand Road, where Whole Foods is. I wished to avoid I-90 not because of the speed – which I would exceed – but more because I-90 is a toll road, and I didn’t want to spend extra money on my trip.
It was on the way home that it hit me. I’m my Dad. I’m the “back roads” guy. I was doing it as far back as the mid-1990s, when I lived in southern Illinois. Where the trip home or back was about 4 hours via I-57, I often “explored” alternate routes, taking the state routes down there and needlessly adding 2 hours to my trip.
And since I’ve moved back to Chicago and took the job I have now, I’ve accumulated at least three alternate routes to get home when traffic along I-90 was too heavy, or when I didn’t care to deal with the idiots and the brainless along the way.
Even now that I live only ten minutes from the office, I have been assessing the alternatives for getting there and back.
At the very least, taking the alternate routes means you know the alternate routes, and in emergencies that can be a good thing. At best, taking the alternate route gives you an alternate view and lets you see things you wouldn’t otherwise see. It doesn’t mean much on the daily commute, I guess, but it can give you a whole different perspective on your world when you’re on a road trip somewhere.
Say what you will about Dad; for all his back roads and side trips, he still got to where he was going, and at a calmer pace, yet, and he’s still right where he is now, if that makes any sense. And, if you ask my opinion, I think he’s all the richer for it.
And, frankly, so am I.
On those rare occasions that a portion of us did pile into the car, it was always Dad at the wheel. Mom never had a driver’s license until 1973 – when she was 45 years old – so I’m sure it was an unspoken mistrust of her driving skills, as well as her preference, that placed Dad behind the wheel.
I don’t know if it’s something that comes with age, or at a certain specific age, but Dad never seemed to be in much of a hurry to get anywhere. He has spoken of the foolish things he did as a young man involving cars and excessive speed, but by the time I, “The Caboose,” came along there was nothing left of that foolish young man, and we made our way to every destination at or below the posted speed limit.
Even worse, Dad never liked to use the “expressways,” as they’re known here in the Midwest. Much to my sisters’ chagrin, no matter the distance to a destination, certainly if it was local, Dad would chart a course on the map in his brain for the “back roads” route, usually the most direct – but not the quickest – way to get there.
*** *** *** ***
Each of us spends the first twenty to twenty five years of life refuting the observations of others about how much we look like or take after either or both of our parents. But then we say or do something that drives home the crux of all those third-party observations: we do look like and take after one or both of our progenitors!
I first noticed it in myself when I saw a photo taken of me while helping to dig a drainage trench around my unit’s 13-man tent while on a military exercise in Germany. I was bent over my ridiculously inadequate entrenching tool and pushing its blade into the earth with my foot. My image was frozen on film, hunched over in profile. And there, at the age of 20, I saw both the resemblance to and a trait of my father: in my effort and concentration, I was pursing my lips just like my father does, and I looked EXACTLY like him (except my nose had not (and still has not (yet)) expanded to the proportions of his nose)!
It was one of those rare moments this morning as I drove to Whole Foods Market, a blank-mind moment when thoughts are flying freely in and out while the brain handles the primary task of avoiding the oncoming traffic and the idiots whose brains aren’t working properly. Earlier I had consulted Google Maps for the route to get to Whole Foods Market and, though it recommended I get right on I-90 and take it east to Illinois Route 53, and then take that north to Rand Road, I opted instead to take Barrington Road all the way up to Dundee Road, and then Dundee Road east to Rand Road, where Whole Foods is. I wished to avoid I-90 not because of the speed – which I would exceed – but more because I-90 is a toll road, and I didn’t want to spend extra money on my trip.
It was on the way home that it hit me. I’m my Dad. I’m the “back roads” guy. I was doing it as far back as the mid-1990s, when I lived in southern Illinois. Where the trip home or back was about 4 hours via I-57, I often “explored” alternate routes, taking the state routes down there and needlessly adding 2 hours to my trip.
And since I’ve moved back to Chicago and took the job I have now, I’ve accumulated at least three alternate routes to get home when traffic along I-90 was too heavy, or when I didn’t care to deal with the idiots and the brainless along the way.
Even now that I live only ten minutes from the office, I have been assessing the alternatives for getting there and back.
At the very least, taking the alternate routes means you know the alternate routes, and in emergencies that can be a good thing. At best, taking the alternate route gives you an alternate view and lets you see things you wouldn’t otherwise see. It doesn’t mean much on the daily commute, I guess, but it can give you a whole different perspective on your world when you’re on a road trip somewhere.
Say what you will about Dad; for all his back roads and side trips, he still got to where he was going, and at a calmer pace, yet, and he’s still right where he is now, if that makes any sense. And, if you ask my opinion, I think he’s all the richer for it.
And, frankly, so am I.
Friday, October 26, 2007
What's Wrong With Dining Alone?
I’ve had conversations with a few people who won’t or who just can’t dine alone. And by that I mean, go out to a nice, sit-down, table- service restaurant by themselves, have a seat, and have a meal. It seems alien to them.
Why?
Okay, it sucks that things have turned out for me the way they have. I thought I’d be married to Mrs. Farrago for the rest of my life. I was wrong. But should the absence of her beside me stop me from going out and having a nice meal? Maybe I lived alone too long before she re-entered my life, but, even now, going alone to a fine dining establishment doesn’t fill me with a level of social stress that makes me second guess my decision to go there.
Is there some social stigma that life failed to program into me?
Would I prefer some company? Of course I would. I just don’t have anybody on my dance card at the moment. I have a co-worker who, in the past, when we’ve been out on the road, has been traumatized when I’ve told him I just wasn’t hungry, and for him to take the rental vehicle and go alone to wherever he wants.
“I can’t go alone!” This is a grown man with a wife and kids. “You have to go with me!”
And then he looks at me strangely whenever I tell him I had dinner out alone.
So I assessed my food situation: I have no leftovers in the house to eat; I have consistently forgotten to buy bread this week, so sandwiches are out; I’m leaving town for a week tomorrow, and I don’t want to generate any leftovers to sit in the refrigerator and incubate. So, since I’ve caught myself salivating every time this week each time I rediscovered the Macaroni Grill restaurant almost literally a stone’s throw from my apartment complex, I decided a treat was in order. And I went to dinner. Alone. I didn’t ask anybody along. I didn’t think of anybody to ask.
Do you think it’s strange? Or better yet, do you think I’m strange? What do you/would you do in such a situation? Hit a fast food place? Curl up on the couch and eat sardines and crackers? Pick Doritos crumbs from between the cushions?
(The Chicken and Shrimp Scallopine was outstanding, by the way!)
Why?
Okay, it sucks that things have turned out for me the way they have. I thought I’d be married to Mrs. Farrago for the rest of my life. I was wrong. But should the absence of her beside me stop me from going out and having a nice meal? Maybe I lived alone too long before she re-entered my life, but, even now, going alone to a fine dining establishment doesn’t fill me with a level of social stress that makes me second guess my decision to go there.
Is there some social stigma that life failed to program into me?
Would I prefer some company? Of course I would. I just don’t have anybody on my dance card at the moment. I have a co-worker who, in the past, when we’ve been out on the road, has been traumatized when I’ve told him I just wasn’t hungry, and for him to take the rental vehicle and go alone to wherever he wants.
“I can’t go alone!” This is a grown man with a wife and kids. “You have to go with me!”
And then he looks at me strangely whenever I tell him I had dinner out alone.
So I assessed my food situation: I have no leftovers in the house to eat; I have consistently forgotten to buy bread this week, so sandwiches are out; I’m leaving town for a week tomorrow, and I don’t want to generate any leftovers to sit in the refrigerator and incubate. So, since I’ve caught myself salivating every time this week each time I rediscovered the Macaroni Grill restaurant almost literally a stone’s throw from my apartment complex, I decided a treat was in order. And I went to dinner. Alone. I didn’t ask anybody along. I didn’t think of anybody to ask.
Do you think it’s strange? Or better yet, do you think I’m strange? What do you/would you do in such a situation? Hit a fast food place? Curl up on the couch and eat sardines and crackers? Pick Doritos crumbs from between the cushions?
(The Chicken and Shrimp Scallopine was outstanding, by the way!)
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Lost In Boston
My first time ever in Boston was in the middle of a road trip back in 1990. My best friend, Lu, needed to get to Lenox, Massachusetts, for his second summer away from university as a boys’ camp counselor. I needed to get away after a non-stop year-and-a-half of classes and work, and I had suggested the road trip to serve a dual purpose: get him to Lenox, and get me on a vacation.
As university students, we had become adept at finding the cheapest way around things. The previous summer Lu had boarded a Greyhound bus for Lenox, and endured a 26-hour nightmare of multiple stops, changing buses and sleep deprivation. But it only cost him about a hundred bucks! I proposed we split the cost of gas, despite the fact that it had peaked at an outrageous $1.16 per gallon that spring, and he suggested we sleep at a youth hostel along the way, where the cost was about $10 for each of us, plus a couple of house chores we had to do to earn our keep.
When the semester ended near the end of May, we both went home to spend a few days with our families, and then it was time to travel. I’ve always been drawn to the open road. If I hadn’t discovered the field I’m in now, I probably would eventually have pursued a career as a truck driver or something. It’s probably why I went for – and have held – the job I have now. However, now that I have seen the dangers with which it is fraught, and the amount of under-the-table diplomacy it involves, the career of freight hauling no longer holds any allure. Regardless, I have always been drawn to the open road. And so it was that I lobbied my buddy for us to avoid the speed and convenience of Interstate 80 and opt instead for the quaint solitude of US Route 30, to which we had easy access because it runs right through our home town. He agreed, and off we went.
Nine hours later we were only half the distance we could have been on the interstate, and we were both getting pretty tired. We consulted the hostel guide and found that we were only an hour or so away from one in (Upper Sandusky?), Ohio, so we headed there.
We paid our ten dollars and were told that the kitchen needed cleaning. One would think that two former military guys like us (he was in the Marines, I the Air Force) would be no strangers to kitchen duty. Well, we weren’t; but it doesn’t mean we liked it. I’m sure I did more, but all I remember was polishing the toaster which I recall was so disgusting when I picked it up that I wondered why no hostelers before us had been tasked with cleaning it. Then it dawned on me that perhaps they HAD been! YYIICCHH!!
The next morning Lu asked if we could just hop on the interstate for the rest of the trip because the camp was only open during the summer, and he didn’t want to miss it. We were in Lenox by nightfall. Lu introduced me to a couple of the friends he had made the previous summer, and they showed us where we could bunk for the night. It was a fairly rustic cabin, and I gather that Lenox is considerably farther north than any climate in which I had existed in the prior two years. Or maybe it was just a freakishly cold night for late May. Either way, the blanket the guys gave me might as well have been a sheet of facial tissue for as warm as it kept me. Needless to say, I got no sleep that night for fear that if I did sleep, I would have been found blue and lifeless in the morning, huddled under that paper-thin patch of cloth.
In the morning I bid farewell to my buddy and headed south. The rest of my trip had me destined for Long Island, New York to visit my friend, Linda, who had just been graduated from my same course of study, and had moved back home; and then for Washington, D.C., to visit my friend CJ whom I had met and befriended in Great Falls, Montana while I was in the Air Force. You might think I’m protecting her identity by using only her initials, but that’s what she goes by. CJ. It would seem awkward to me to call her by her given name.
But first I wanted to spend some time in Boston. I looked for another youth hostel and found one listed in the guide book, located right smack in the middle of downtown. I followed the directions in the book and… they were useless. The highway exit the book told me to take didn’t exist. I could see from the highway above the surface streets one or two important-looking colonial era buildings, historical relics of our nation’s birth and infancy, but I could find no logical route to get down there. I took the next exit I came to, figuring I would hit the surface streets, find my bearings and go around the block to get where I wanted to be. That's when I learned there's no such thing as "going around the block" in Boston. Instead, I wound up on an entrance ramp BACK onto the highway! It quickly became like that nightmare where you are unable to find something important, and no matter where you look, it’s not there, and you’re forever hunting for it to the point that you want to scream. And scream I did!
I doubled back and found the same exit and, after making the SAME STUPID MOVE that got me back on the highway again, I returned and tried something different. That put me on a side street that took me to the edge of downtown. I pulled into the parking lot of a body shop or auto mechanic’s shop and asked the grimy, yet kindly employee standing just outside the building for directions. I am not exaggerating when I say that this is the essence of how he told me to get back to the city center (imagine the thickest Boston accent you’ve ever heard): Yeah, you go don tuh thuh cona theea and turn left. Then, when you get to where Bruno’s hot dooawg stand used ta be, you make anutha left…”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not from around here. I don’t know where anything used to be.”
He looked at me blankly for a second, and then he said, “Oh. Okay. Then turn arond heea, go ten, fifteen blocks chroo Jamaica Plain and Roxbury, theea…”
I offered my thanks and drove away. I eventually found my way back to city center and decided that the only way I was going to get to see anything or find the hostel was on foot. I parked somewhere – I don’t remember if it was on the street or in a parking garage – and with guide in hand, I set out to find the hostel.
I found the intersection nearest the hostel. It was a street on two levels. I walked to where the little map showed me the hostel was, in the middle of the block. The address didn’t exist. I made my way down to the lower level. The address didn’t exist. I spent an hour of the time I had hoped to explore this American Revolution Era city looking for this stupid youth hostel which, as far as I could ever tell, didn’t even exist!
The exercise in futility over, I said, “Screw it!” (I didn’t REALLY say “SCREW it,” but you get the picture) and I vowed never to return to the stupid city of Boston. I hopped back in the Jeep and continued south, and spent the night at a sleazy motel in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.
It wasn’t until 2004 that I returned to Boston – this time on business, and I had locals to drive me around – and I learned that, especially in the summer, it is an incredibly beautiful place with wonderful old buildings and not ungraceful new ones, and large, green, quiet parks all over the place. And I can’t forget to mention the historical buildings and locales, and The Freedom Trail, a line of red paint or red paving bricks in the walks, which leads you to notable historic locations throughout downtown.
And then, Wednesday night, I finally met a friend in Boston: Mr. Schprock. He met me at my hotel, and we walked about 7 miles to Faneuil Hall marketplace where he suggested any number of restaurants and left it up to me to choose. I deferred to his knowledge of which place was true Boston dining and, in a very slight Boston accent he said, “That would be Durgin Park.”
We paused to try to avoid the direct gaze of a staggering drunk homeless (I think?) person who appeared to be sizing me up 1) for how much money he thought I might give him; 2) as an out-of-towner; b) to locate the softest part of my skull where he could bash it in for however much money he thought he could take from me. He never even so much as looked at Schprock. Just me. Maybe he doesn’t like tall, slim, thick-haired men.
He must have overheard us because, as we headed for the Durgin Park, ahead of us so did our new friend who also made a bee-line (okay, a heavily pollen-laden and substantially inebriated bee) for the men’s room. I swear he must have eavesdropped on our conversation, because that was the first stop I wanted to make when we got to the restaurant!
I went against my usual tradition of ordering anything formerly hoofed and instead went with the broiled seafood platter. And then I proceeded to talk Mr. Schprock’s ear off while we discussed every topic from writing to the macro-economics of the nation of Burundi. It was a great evening, even though we encountered not even one stripper – at least none that we know of. For those of you who have ever wished to meet him, he’s everything you would expect. For those of you who hate him, he’s really a nice guy. And when he walked me back to my hotel (had he not, I’d be lost in Boston again!) and we said our good-byes, we shook hands as friends.
(If you see Mr. Schprock, he’s very self-conscious about the ear thing. It landed right in his plate, and he ate it without even realizing it. So try not to mention it. And don’t stare. It’s rude.)
As university students, we had become adept at finding the cheapest way around things. The previous summer Lu had boarded a Greyhound bus for Lenox, and endured a 26-hour nightmare of multiple stops, changing buses and sleep deprivation. But it only cost him about a hundred bucks! I proposed we split the cost of gas, despite the fact that it had peaked at an outrageous $1.16 per gallon that spring, and he suggested we sleep at a youth hostel along the way, where the cost was about $10 for each of us, plus a couple of house chores we had to do to earn our keep.
When the semester ended near the end of May, we both went home to spend a few days with our families, and then it was time to travel. I’ve always been drawn to the open road. If I hadn’t discovered the field I’m in now, I probably would eventually have pursued a career as a truck driver or something. It’s probably why I went for – and have held – the job I have now. However, now that I have seen the dangers with which it is fraught, and the amount of under-the-table diplomacy it involves, the career of freight hauling no longer holds any allure. Regardless, I have always been drawn to the open road. And so it was that I lobbied my buddy for us to avoid the speed and convenience of Interstate 80 and opt instead for the quaint solitude of US Route 30, to which we had easy access because it runs right through our home town. He agreed, and off we went.
Nine hours later we were only half the distance we could have been on the interstate, and we were both getting pretty tired. We consulted the hostel guide and found that we were only an hour or so away from one in (Upper Sandusky?), Ohio, so we headed there.
We paid our ten dollars and were told that the kitchen needed cleaning. One would think that two former military guys like us (he was in the Marines, I the Air Force) would be no strangers to kitchen duty. Well, we weren’t; but it doesn’t mean we liked it. I’m sure I did more, but all I remember was polishing the toaster which I recall was so disgusting when I picked it up that I wondered why no hostelers before us had been tasked with cleaning it. Then it dawned on me that perhaps they HAD been! YYIICCHH!!
The next morning Lu asked if we could just hop on the interstate for the rest of the trip because the camp was only open during the summer, and he didn’t want to miss it. We were in Lenox by nightfall. Lu introduced me to a couple of the friends he had made the previous summer, and they showed us where we could bunk for the night. It was a fairly rustic cabin, and I gather that Lenox is considerably farther north than any climate in which I had existed in the prior two years. Or maybe it was just a freakishly cold night for late May. Either way, the blanket the guys gave me might as well have been a sheet of facial tissue for as warm as it kept me. Needless to say, I got no sleep that night for fear that if I did sleep, I would have been found blue and lifeless in the morning, huddled under that paper-thin patch of cloth.
In the morning I bid farewell to my buddy and headed south. The rest of my trip had me destined for Long Island, New York to visit my friend, Linda, who had just been graduated from my same course of study, and had moved back home; and then for Washington, D.C., to visit my friend CJ whom I had met and befriended in Great Falls, Montana while I was in the Air Force. You might think I’m protecting her identity by using only her initials, but that’s what she goes by. CJ. It would seem awkward to me to call her by her given name.
But first I wanted to spend some time in Boston. I looked for another youth hostel and found one listed in the guide book, located right smack in the middle of downtown. I followed the directions in the book and… they were useless. The highway exit the book told me to take didn’t exist. I could see from the highway above the surface streets one or two important-looking colonial era buildings, historical relics of our nation’s birth and infancy, but I could find no logical route to get down there. I took the next exit I came to, figuring I would hit the surface streets, find my bearings and go around the block to get where I wanted to be. That's when I learned there's no such thing as "going around the block" in Boston. Instead, I wound up on an entrance ramp BACK onto the highway! It quickly became like that nightmare where you are unable to find something important, and no matter where you look, it’s not there, and you’re forever hunting for it to the point that you want to scream. And scream I did!
I doubled back and found the same exit and, after making the SAME STUPID MOVE that got me back on the highway again, I returned and tried something different. That put me on a side street that took me to the edge of downtown. I pulled into the parking lot of a body shop or auto mechanic’s shop and asked the grimy, yet kindly employee standing just outside the building for directions. I am not exaggerating when I say that this is the essence of how he told me to get back to the city center (imagine the thickest Boston accent you’ve ever heard): Yeah, you go don tuh thuh cona theea and turn left. Then, when you get to where Bruno’s hot dooawg stand used ta be, you make anutha left…”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not from around here. I don’t know where anything used to be.”
He looked at me blankly for a second, and then he said, “Oh. Okay. Then turn arond heea, go ten, fifteen blocks chroo Jamaica Plain and Roxbury, theea…”
I offered my thanks and drove away. I eventually found my way back to city center and decided that the only way I was going to get to see anything or find the hostel was on foot. I parked somewhere – I don’t remember if it was on the street or in a parking garage – and with guide in hand, I set out to find the hostel.
I found the intersection nearest the hostel. It was a street on two levels. I walked to where the little map showed me the hostel was, in the middle of the block. The address didn’t exist. I made my way down to the lower level. The address didn’t exist. I spent an hour of the time I had hoped to explore this American Revolution Era city looking for this stupid youth hostel which, as far as I could ever tell, didn’t even exist!
The exercise in futility over, I said, “Screw it!” (I didn’t REALLY say “SCREW it,” but you get the picture) and I vowed never to return to the stupid city of Boston. I hopped back in the Jeep and continued south, and spent the night at a sleazy motel in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.
It wasn’t until 2004 that I returned to Boston – this time on business, and I had locals to drive me around – and I learned that, especially in the summer, it is an incredibly beautiful place with wonderful old buildings and not ungraceful new ones, and large, green, quiet parks all over the place. And I can’t forget to mention the historical buildings and locales, and The Freedom Trail, a line of red paint or red paving bricks in the walks, which leads you to notable historic locations throughout downtown.
And then, Wednesday night, I finally met a friend in Boston: Mr. Schprock. He met me at my hotel, and we walked about 7 miles to Faneuil Hall marketplace where he suggested any number of restaurants and left it up to me to choose. I deferred to his knowledge of which place was true Boston dining and, in a very slight Boston accent he said, “That would be Durgin Park.”
We paused to try to avoid the direct gaze of a staggering drunk homeless (I think?) person who appeared to be sizing me up 1) for how much money he thought I might give him; 2) as an out-of-towner; b) to locate the softest part of my skull where he could bash it in for however much money he thought he could take from me. He never even so much as looked at Schprock. Just me. Maybe he doesn’t like tall, slim, thick-haired men.
He must have overheard us because, as we headed for the Durgin Park, ahead of us so did our new friend who also made a bee-line (okay, a heavily pollen-laden and substantially inebriated bee) for the men’s room. I swear he must have eavesdropped on our conversation, because that was the first stop I wanted to make when we got to the restaurant!
I went against my usual tradition of ordering anything formerly hoofed and instead went with the broiled seafood platter. And then I proceeded to talk Mr. Schprock’s ear off while we discussed every topic from writing to the macro-economics of the nation of Burundi. It was a great evening, even though we encountered not even one stripper – at least none that we know of. For those of you who have ever wished to meet him, he’s everything you would expect. For those of you who hate him, he’s really a nice guy. And when he walked me back to my hotel (had he not, I’d be lost in Boston again!) and we said our good-byes, we shook hands as friends.
(If you see Mr. Schprock, he’s very self-conscious about the ear thing. It landed right in his plate, and he ate it without even realizing it. So try not to mention it. And don’t stare. It’s rude.)
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Starting Over
I moved into my new apartment Saturday. It was quite the experience, as I had returned home from Hawaii on a red-eye that morning. A co-worker, to whom I am deeply indebted in gratitude, helped me as we headed straight from the airport to the office, borrowed the company’s box truck, drove it to my house and loaded it up with my junk. It took much longer than I had hoped it would. Mrs. Farrago said I have a lot more stuff than I realized, but I think it’s more that I gave myself too little time to prepare and had much packing to do, and did the majority of it on moving day. That’s what really slowed everything down.
The worst part of the day was unloading the truck into the apartment. In hindsight, we did it the wrong way. From where the truck was parked we had to walk half the length of the entire building to get in through the main entrance at the southwest end of the building, and then back about 2/3 that distance to the door to my apartment. The “rear” door, which faces the parking lot and is about 1/3 the distance to where the truck was compared to the main entrance would have been the better choice, with much wider steps to climb outside, and only one set of stairs inside, versus the two sets of steps and the U-turn in the middle at the main entrance. I didn’t think I had the right key for the rear door. By the time we arrived at my apartment it was mid-afternoon. My only defense is that we were both so tired from the long flight from Hawaii and the day of pushing past the urge to sleep that neither of us thought to go OUT the rear door and prop it open, and save our backs and heads from the ensuing aches our decision caused. I found out Sunday I had the right key after all.
I still have a few things still to move, but it’s not terribly much. It’s all stuff I can move by myself or with the help of handtrucks.
The apartment, three days later, is still in a state of disarray. I have unloaded very few boxes as Sunday I slept in until 11:00, went back to the house for more stuff, dumped that off in the apartment and went back out to buy kitchen stuff I need to survive. And I was up until 2:00am Monday morning! Monday evening I emptied a few boxes and hung up clothes, but, still without a full complement of cooking items or stuff with which to clean them, I had to go out again to eat, and do a little more shopping.
Tuesday I headed out mid-day from the office for two nights in Boston, so I won’t get back to the apartment until Thursday evening.
Moving can be a depressing experience, despite the circumstances. You take everything you own, package it up into neat little boxes – or not – and you load it all into a truck. When it’s all there in one eyeful, you realize a few things at once: Man! I have a lot of stuff! And then comes the realization: I’ve been collecting stuff for (x) years, and THIS JUNK is all I have to show for it?!
Most of it is stuff I really should get rid of.
And then, of course, come the circumstances; the failed effort, the interrupted dreams, the plans for the house and our future we had made that still rattle around in my head as though I’m still part of it all. It’s almost as though there was a death. And I guess there was – our marriage.
I try to look forward to singlehood, to the freedom to do what I please when I please, without having to consider her wishes. I admit there were times when anger wedged between us that I considered what I would do if we split up, the women I would chase, the hobbies and time-killers I would indulge. But now that it has come to pass, suddenly no other women are attractive, my distractions are no longer enticing, my free time is empty of everything except my thoughts.
Granted, I’ve only been officially out of the house for three days. I’m sure the grief will eventually subside.
In the meantime, I’m spending two nights in Boston on business, and I have a dinner date with Mr. Schprock on Wednesday. My hope is that he’ll get me liquored up for a night I won’t remember, and I’ll wake up Thursday morning in the arms of the most popular stripper in Beantown. Only, with the way my luck has been running, that stripper will have a name like Kurt or Sven. Good thing it’s a night I won’t remember.
The worst part of the day was unloading the truck into the apartment. In hindsight, we did it the wrong way. From where the truck was parked we had to walk half the length of the entire building to get in through the main entrance at the southwest end of the building, and then back about 2/3 that distance to the door to my apartment. The “rear” door, which faces the parking lot and is about 1/3 the distance to where the truck was compared to the main entrance would have been the better choice, with much wider steps to climb outside, and only one set of stairs inside, versus the two sets of steps and the U-turn in the middle at the main entrance. I didn’t think I had the right key for the rear door. By the time we arrived at my apartment it was mid-afternoon. My only defense is that we were both so tired from the long flight from Hawaii and the day of pushing past the urge to sleep that neither of us thought to go OUT the rear door and prop it open, and save our backs and heads from the ensuing aches our decision caused. I found out Sunday I had the right key after all.
I still have a few things still to move, but it’s not terribly much. It’s all stuff I can move by myself or with the help of handtrucks.
The apartment, three days later, is still in a state of disarray. I have unloaded very few boxes as Sunday I slept in until 11:00, went back to the house for more stuff, dumped that off in the apartment and went back out to buy kitchen stuff I need to survive. And I was up until 2:00am Monday morning! Monday evening I emptied a few boxes and hung up clothes, but, still without a full complement of cooking items or stuff with which to clean them, I had to go out again to eat, and do a little more shopping.
Tuesday I headed out mid-day from the office for two nights in Boston, so I won’t get back to the apartment until Thursday evening.
Moving can be a depressing experience, despite the circumstances. You take everything you own, package it up into neat little boxes – or not – and you load it all into a truck. When it’s all there in one eyeful, you realize a few things at once: Man! I have a lot of stuff! And then comes the realization: I’ve been collecting stuff for (x) years, and THIS JUNK is all I have to show for it?!
Most of it is stuff I really should get rid of.
And then, of course, come the circumstances; the failed effort, the interrupted dreams, the plans for the house and our future we had made that still rattle around in my head as though I’m still part of it all. It’s almost as though there was a death. And I guess there was – our marriage.
I try to look forward to singlehood, to the freedom to do what I please when I please, without having to consider her wishes. I admit there were times when anger wedged between us that I considered what I would do if we split up, the women I would chase, the hobbies and time-killers I would indulge. But now that it has come to pass, suddenly no other women are attractive, my distractions are no longer enticing, my free time is empty of everything except my thoughts.
Granted, I’ve only been officially out of the house for three days. I’m sure the grief will eventually subside.
In the meantime, I’m spending two nights in Boston on business, and I have a dinner date with Mr. Schprock on Wednesday. My hope is that he’ll get me liquored up for a night I won’t remember, and I’ll wake up Thursday morning in the arms of the most popular stripper in Beantown. Only, with the way my luck has been running, that stripper will have a name like Kurt or Sven. Good thing it’s a night I won’t remember.
Monday, October 01, 2007
And The Walls Come Tumbling Down
Post drought is nothing new to my blog, and there's usually nothing weighty to cause my scarcity. However, this time it's probably one of the weightiest matters to come down on me in my life.
Mrs. Farrago and I are splitting up. Divorcing. Kaput.
It's something that's been coming at us for a while, and there's plenty of blame to go around. Well, to the two of us, anyway. And Schprock. I don't know for what exactly, but I hold him partly responsible.* I never let on to our problems here in my blog for a couple of reasons. Number one, Mrs. Farrago reads it -- or at least she used to -- and I'm likely to highlight her flaws and accentuate my virtues (what, like I'm gonna tell you what a jackass I am?!); number two, DENIAL.
Needless to say, writing has not been in the forefront of my thoughts of late.
We're keeping it amicable. There are still a lot of tears every day, a lot of emotional pain for me over the reality that love faded and we drifted, but we're trying to be civil toward each other and make this split as painless as it can be.
I'm sure this will all be fodder for my blog in the future, after the papers have been signed and the judge has approved it and the lawyer's been paid and the ex-Mrs. Farrago can't kick me out of anywhere, but for now it's just the first public announcement that this union is dissolving.
I wish it wasn't so, but I spent all my best wishes to find her. I should have kept a few in reserve for this moment.
*Of course, I'm kidding. Schprock had nothing to do with the breakup...just the fathering of her child.... and the genital warts.**
**Again, I'm kidding. He gave the genital warts to ME.***
Mrs. Farrago and I are splitting up. Divorcing. Kaput.
It's something that's been coming at us for a while, and there's plenty of blame to go around. Well, to the two of us, anyway. And Schprock. I don't know for what exactly, but I hold him partly responsible.* I never let on to our problems here in my blog for a couple of reasons. Number one, Mrs. Farrago reads it -- or at least she used to -- and I'm likely to highlight her flaws and accentuate my virtues (what, like I'm gonna tell you what a jackass I am?!); number two, DENIAL.
Needless to say, writing has not been in the forefront of my thoughts of late.
We're keeping it amicable. There are still a lot of tears every day, a lot of emotional pain for me over the reality that love faded and we drifted, but we're trying to be civil toward each other and make this split as painless as it can be.
I'm sure this will all be fodder for my blog in the future, after the papers have been signed and the judge has approved it and the lawyer's been paid and the ex-Mrs. Farrago can't kick me out of anywhere, but for now it's just the first public announcement that this union is dissolving.
I wish it wasn't so, but I spent all my best wishes to find her. I should have kept a few in reserve for this moment.
*Of course, I'm kidding. Schprock had nothing to do with the breakup...just the fathering of her child.... and the genital warts.**
**Again, I'm kidding. He gave the genital warts to ME.***
Friday, September 07, 2007
One Thing
Beth posted a meme that I was going to answer in her comments section, but it came out to be so damn long I would have felt guilty clogging up her blog with my crap.
No more blog clog.
I'll present it the same way she did, first listing the questions, and then listing my answers below.
So, here it is, The One Thing.
1. If you could recommend only one book for others to read, what would it be and why?
2. What is your one favorite song? Why?
3. What is the one thing that is the biggest time saver in your life?
4. What is one gadget you couldn't live without and why?
5. If you could recommend one film for others to see, what would it be and why?
6. What is the one cure or preventative measure you believe in and for what ailment?
7. What is the best advice you've ever received and from whom?
8. If you could introduce the entire world to just one band/musical artist, who would it be and why?
9. If you could convince others you meet or know of one thing, what would it be?
10. What do you believe is one of the greatest ways of wasting money and how do you combat it?
-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-
1. If you could recommend only one book for others to read, what would it be and why?
The Green Mile, by Stephen King. It’s a work that truly demonstrates King’s talent as a master writer and storyteller, elevating him above the horror genre he helped make famous. I never was a fan of his horror novels – I’m still not – but this story is fantastically conceived, beautifully written and cleverly told. If you think you don’t like Stephen King, give this one a read.
2. What is your one favorite song? Why?
“Lovin’, Touchin’, Squeezin,” by Journey, a lovely song about pain and comeuppance! LOL! It’s a simple melody, it’s easy to remember the words, and Steve Perry shone perhaps his brightest vocally on it. I love belting tunes in the car or when I’m home alone, and this is one, on a good day, that I can nail the high notes!
3. What is the one thing that is the biggest time saver in your life?
Somewhere around age 30 I learned to stop worrying about all the little crap. It may not actually save me any time, but time sure seems to go by more quickly without worrying whether or not that client took the joke wrong that made him laugh out loud… Of course, now there’s the problem of procrastination… more on that later….
4. What is one gadget you couldn't live without and why?
The toilet. It eases stress, affords a place to sit and… uh… think, and, when you get up, you’re able to flush away one of the day’s annoyances. I suppose I could do without the computer/internet. I could satisfy my writing jones with a typewriter…or pen and paper, if it came to that. And I could use the phone to communicate immediately with friends and family. But take away the toilet, and what have you got? A nasty hole in the floor, that’s what!
5. If you could recommend one film for others to see, what would it be and why?
“It’s A Wonderful Life,” 1946, Frank Capra, director. Forget for the moment that it was played to death by every TV station that could get their hands on it in the 1980s. Forget for the moment that NBC now milks it to death with commercial interruptions. Discover once more the magic of the story that it tells of one nobody’s importance to the people around him, of the impact one person has in his lifetime on an untold number of lives, and that no one is a failure who has friends. Yes, it has that pasty, post-war sweetness of other movies of its era, but no one has yet been able to recreate its message with quite as much power or real emotion. Give it another chance.
6. What is the one cure or preventative measure you believe in and for what ailment?
Pooping. I’m not being fecetious (that typo is intentional). When I was a kid, I used to get a lot of headaches. When I’d complain to my mother, she would ask me if I’d had a bowel movement that day. Of course, I’d argue with her, “What’s pooping got to do with a headache?” To which she would simply ask the question again. Finally, when I said, “No,” she would ask, “Do you have to?” At which point I would stop and think, and realize that, indeed, I did! I’d go, and then a while later she would ask how my headache was, and of course, it would be gone. So today, when I have a headache, it’s the first thing I ask myself before I pop pills or guzzle a quart of water…and to this day it still is often the cure!
7. What is the best advice you've ever received and from whom?
“Always have something to fall back on,” urged my father when I (briefly) pursued a career as an actor. It’s how I found video production. And it’s what I fell back on!
8. If you could introduce the entire world to just one band/musical artist, who would it be and why?
It’s a band that needs no introduction, of course: The Beatles. In existence as a performing and recording entity for a mere ten years, their influence on music and the recording industry itself still ripples and reverberates today. Few bands willingly flex their musical muscles the way those four did (few bands have the musical muscles!), and they exposed many fans to numerous different musical styles that they might otherwise never have visited.
9. If you could convince others you meet or know of one thing, what would it be?
The world is NOT going to hell in a hand-basket! The television and print news media make their money on viewership and readership, and the only way they’ve been able to succeed at it is to appeal to the human desire to be entertained and thrilled. Stories about murder and car crashes and child predation and people getting ripped off are high drama, and we eat it up like flies on the proverbial pile of poo. Of course, stories about happy people and how great things are would get boring after a while, because nobody is getting screwed! The long-term effect, however, is that we tend to extrapolate the little world we see on our televisions and apply it to the real world. How many of the 300 million people in America WEREN’T murdered today? How many children WEREN’T molested today? Honestly, those who were make up a vastly tiny 0.0000001 percent of the entire population. And though, yes, terrible crimes as they all are, it is FAR from epidemic. These types of crimes have been committed against others throughout human history; it’s just that with the far-reaching, high-access global media we have today, we hear about more of it than we ever realized was happening. So go back outside. Let your kids play in the yard. Run with scissors. Don’t wash your hands before dinner (and if you do, CERTAINLY don’t use anti-bacterial soap). You’ll live.
10. What do you believe is one of the greatest ways of wasting money and how do you combat it?
The greatest way I waste money is by having an ATM card. If I have money in my pocket, I’m going to spend it. If I have the ATM card in my pocket, and an ATM close by, I’m going to get money, and I’m going to spend it. I don’t know whose ATM card it is, but it works, and I spend the money. I’m kidding, of course. But that’s how it seems. I always seem to be down to several singles in my pocket when I swear just a day or two before I had a couple-three twenties.
There. Yeesh! More insight into my mind than you ever wanted. Blame Beth. And then visit her blog.
And, of course, now that you've read mine, you are required to create yours. Now hop to it!
No more blog clog.
I'll present it the same way she did, first listing the questions, and then listing my answers below.
So, here it is, The One Thing.
1. If you could recommend only one book for others to read, what would it be and why?
2. What is your one favorite song? Why?
3. What is the one thing that is the biggest time saver in your life?
4. What is one gadget you couldn't live without and why?
5. If you could recommend one film for others to see, what would it be and why?
6. What is the one cure or preventative measure you believe in and for what ailment?
7. What is the best advice you've ever received and from whom?
8. If you could introduce the entire world to just one band/musical artist, who would it be and why?
9. If you could convince others you meet or know of one thing, what would it be?
10. What do you believe is one of the greatest ways of wasting money and how do you combat it?
-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-
1. If you could recommend only one book for others to read, what would it be and why?
The Green Mile, by Stephen King. It’s a work that truly demonstrates King’s talent as a master writer and storyteller, elevating him above the horror genre he helped make famous. I never was a fan of his horror novels – I’m still not – but this story is fantastically conceived, beautifully written and cleverly told. If you think you don’t like Stephen King, give this one a read.
2. What is your one favorite song? Why?
“Lovin’, Touchin’, Squeezin,” by Journey, a lovely song about pain and comeuppance! LOL! It’s a simple melody, it’s easy to remember the words, and Steve Perry shone perhaps his brightest vocally on it. I love belting tunes in the car or when I’m home alone, and this is one, on a good day, that I can nail the high notes!
3. What is the one thing that is the biggest time saver in your life?
Somewhere around age 30 I learned to stop worrying about all the little crap. It may not actually save me any time, but time sure seems to go by more quickly without worrying whether or not that client took the joke wrong that made him laugh out loud… Of course, now there’s the problem of procrastination… more on that later….
4. What is one gadget you couldn't live without and why?
The toilet. It eases stress, affords a place to sit and… uh… think, and, when you get up, you’re able to flush away one of the day’s annoyances. I suppose I could do without the computer/internet. I could satisfy my writing jones with a typewriter…or pen and paper, if it came to that. And I could use the phone to communicate immediately with friends and family. But take away the toilet, and what have you got? A nasty hole in the floor, that’s what!
5. If you could recommend one film for others to see, what would it be and why?
“It’s A Wonderful Life,” 1946, Frank Capra, director. Forget for the moment that it was played to death by every TV station that could get their hands on it in the 1980s. Forget for the moment that NBC now milks it to death with commercial interruptions. Discover once more the magic of the story that it tells of one nobody’s importance to the people around him, of the impact one person has in his lifetime on an untold number of lives, and that no one is a failure who has friends. Yes, it has that pasty, post-war sweetness of other movies of its era, but no one has yet been able to recreate its message with quite as much power or real emotion. Give it another chance.
6. What is the one cure or preventative measure you believe in and for what ailment?
Pooping. I’m not being fecetious (that typo is intentional). When I was a kid, I used to get a lot of headaches. When I’d complain to my mother, she would ask me if I’d had a bowel movement that day. Of course, I’d argue with her, “What’s pooping got to do with a headache?” To which she would simply ask the question again. Finally, when I said, “No,” she would ask, “Do you have to?” At which point I would stop and think, and realize that, indeed, I did! I’d go, and then a while later she would ask how my headache was, and of course, it would be gone. So today, when I have a headache, it’s the first thing I ask myself before I pop pills or guzzle a quart of water…and to this day it still is often the cure!
7. What is the best advice you've ever received and from whom?
“Always have something to fall back on,” urged my father when I (briefly) pursued a career as an actor. It’s how I found video production. And it’s what I fell back on!
8. If you could introduce the entire world to just one band/musical artist, who would it be and why?
It’s a band that needs no introduction, of course: The Beatles. In existence as a performing and recording entity for a mere ten years, their influence on music and the recording industry itself still ripples and reverberates today. Few bands willingly flex their musical muscles the way those four did (few bands have the musical muscles!), and they exposed many fans to numerous different musical styles that they might otherwise never have visited.
9. If you could convince others you meet or know of one thing, what would it be?
The world is NOT going to hell in a hand-basket! The television and print news media make their money on viewership and readership, and the only way they’ve been able to succeed at it is to appeal to the human desire to be entertained and thrilled. Stories about murder and car crashes and child predation and people getting ripped off are high drama, and we eat it up like flies on the proverbial pile of poo. Of course, stories about happy people and how great things are would get boring after a while, because nobody is getting screwed! The long-term effect, however, is that we tend to extrapolate the little world we see on our televisions and apply it to the real world. How many of the 300 million people in America WEREN’T murdered today? How many children WEREN’T molested today? Honestly, those who were make up a vastly tiny 0.0000001 percent of the entire population. And though, yes, terrible crimes as they all are, it is FAR from epidemic. These types of crimes have been committed against others throughout human history; it’s just that with the far-reaching, high-access global media we have today, we hear about more of it than we ever realized was happening. So go back outside. Let your kids play in the yard. Run with scissors. Don’t wash your hands before dinner (and if you do, CERTAINLY don’t use anti-bacterial soap). You’ll live.
10. What do you believe is one of the greatest ways of wasting money and how do you combat it?
The greatest way I waste money is by having an ATM card. If I have money in my pocket, I’m going to spend it. If I have the ATM card in my pocket, and an ATM close by, I’m going to get money, and I’m going to spend it. I don’t know whose ATM card it is, but it works, and I spend the money. I’m kidding, of course. But that’s how it seems. I always seem to be down to several singles in my pocket when I swear just a day or two before I had a couple-three twenties.
There. Yeesh! More insight into my mind than you ever wanted. Blame Beth. And then visit her blog.
And, of course, now that you've read mine, you are required to create yours. Now hop to it!
Thursday, September 06, 2007
Churning Onward
I finally finished posting the London blog. I never expected it to take me a full month to get it up there, but I hit the ground running pretty much as soon as I got home.
The very next day after returning home, I was off to Colorado Springs for two nights, and then our office was still in the midst of a move. The upside is that I got to spend about a week going in to the office wearing shorts and a t-shirt. The downside is that I did still sweat my balls off loading office furniture onto and off of a truck, and taking down a whole studio’s worth of drape and drape track.
And then it was back on a plane across the Atlantic, this time to Stockholm, Sweden, in preparation for a client’s 10-day Baltic Sea cruise. I was in Stockholm for two nights, and then aboard the Regent Cruise Lines “Seven Seas Voyager,” with ports of call in Helsinki, Finland; St. Petersburg, Russia; Tallinn, Estonia; Visby (Gotland), Sweden and Copenhagen, Denmark.
All ports were in countries I had never before visited, and every place was a wonder to behold. I must say, however, that Tallinn and Visby were the most picturesque and gorgeous towns I’ve ever visited, no disrespect to Prague, which comes in third…maybe tied for second…
And time churns onward… only four days home and I’m off again, this time in Washington, D.C., for a week. Nothing as glamorous or as interesting as a 10-day Baltic cruise, but then you can’t eat jelly donuts every day, can you?
Enjoy a few photos from the cruise…
Somewhere in this shot you can see our ship....
Stockholm....
Helsinki....
St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad, formerly Petrograd, formerly St. Petersburg, all since 1917!), though 2 photos certainly can't do it justice....
Tallinn....
Visby, on the island of Gotland....
The very next day after returning home, I was off to Colorado Springs for two nights, and then our office was still in the midst of a move. The upside is that I got to spend about a week going in to the office wearing shorts and a t-shirt. The downside is that I did still sweat my balls off loading office furniture onto and off of a truck, and taking down a whole studio’s worth of drape and drape track.
And then it was back on a plane across the Atlantic, this time to Stockholm, Sweden, in preparation for a client’s 10-day Baltic Sea cruise. I was in Stockholm for two nights, and then aboard the Regent Cruise Lines “Seven Seas Voyager,” with ports of call in Helsinki, Finland; St. Petersburg, Russia; Tallinn, Estonia; Visby (Gotland), Sweden and Copenhagen, Denmark.
All ports were in countries I had never before visited, and every place was a wonder to behold. I must say, however, that Tallinn and Visby were the most picturesque and gorgeous towns I’ve ever visited, no disrespect to Prague, which comes in third…maybe tied for second…
And time churns onward… only four days home and I’m off again, this time in Washington, D.C., for a week. Nothing as glamorous or as interesting as a 10-day Baltic cruise, but then you can’t eat jelly donuts every day, can you?
Enjoy a few photos from the cruise…
Somewhere in this shot you can see our ship....
Stockholm....
Helsinki....
St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad, formerly Petrograd, formerly St. Petersburg, all since 1917!), though 2 photos certainly can't do it justice....
Tallinn....
Visby, on the island of Gotland....
Hot Fuzz
On the flight home from London, I perused the United Airlines entertainment guide and came across a description for “Hot Fuzz,” a film “by the makers of ‘Shaun of the Dead.’” I never saw “Shaun of the Dead,” so I didn’t know what to expect, but the description otherwise intrigued me.
This particular flight offered individual screens for each passenger, allowing personal viewing of a choice of about seven films. Clearly unaware of what to expect, I punched up the channel for “Hot Fuzz.”
On the surface it’s a story about a London cop who’s just too good. His arrest record is 1000% higher than his colleagues’, and so, because he’s making the rest of them look bad, he’s sent away to a small town where, historically, nothing happens. And of course, nothing there is as it seems.
Deep down, however, it’s a good-natured spoof of the Hollywood genre “buddy cop” movies, and manages to send up those movies quite vigorously, as well as entertain in its own right. They nail just about every cliché along the way, from ridiculous car chases to the cheesy lines the bad guys – as well as the charismatic good guys – spew at the climax of a scene, to the impossible gun-fight scenes, to the painfully touching sweet scene at the end.
My biggest surprise came when I heard the ‘f’ word clearly in the dialogue. I checked the guide again and discovered that this film was presented without editing by the airline, so all language was intact! I guess it’s only allowed on international flights, but I’m not complaining!
The “Shaun of the Dead” gang also apparently love blood and gore, so there was a fair bit of that throughout, though it only added comedically to the film.
Bottom line, if you like intelligent spoofs of mindless films, if you don’t mind some raw language or some (funny) mild gore, if you want to laugh yourself silly, oblivious between your headphones while others stare at you as though you’ve come unhinged, buy, rent or otherwise view “Hot Fuzz!”
This particular flight offered individual screens for each passenger, allowing personal viewing of a choice of about seven films. Clearly unaware of what to expect, I punched up the channel for “Hot Fuzz.”
On the surface it’s a story about a London cop who’s just too good. His arrest record is 1000% higher than his colleagues’, and so, because he’s making the rest of them look bad, he’s sent away to a small town where, historically, nothing happens. And of course, nothing there is as it seems.
Deep down, however, it’s a good-natured spoof of the Hollywood genre “buddy cop” movies, and manages to send up those movies quite vigorously, as well as entertain in its own right. They nail just about every cliché along the way, from ridiculous car chases to the cheesy lines the bad guys – as well as the charismatic good guys – spew at the climax of a scene, to the impossible gun-fight scenes, to the painfully touching sweet scene at the end.
My biggest surprise came when I heard the ‘f’ word clearly in the dialogue. I checked the guide again and discovered that this film was presented without editing by the airline, so all language was intact! I guess it’s only allowed on international flights, but I’m not complaining!
The “Shaun of the Dead” gang also apparently love blood and gore, so there was a fair bit of that throughout, though it only added comedically to the film.
Bottom line, if you like intelligent spoofs of mindless films, if you don’t mind some raw language or some (funny) mild gore, if you want to laugh yourself silly, oblivious between your headphones while others stare at you as though you’ve come unhinged, buy, rent or otherwise view “Hot Fuzz!”
Sunday, August 05, 2007
London, Day 9
The Party's Over
The morning came up too quickly, one because I hadn’t had enough time to sleep off Saturday night’s binge, and I had a headache; two because it meant leaving London. But the morning wasn’t going to cease its progress, and so I got up.
Within 45 minutes we three were all showered and dressed, and we headed down for breakfast, which seemed a lonely affair, as we were the only people from our group in the restaurant. At least my headache faded.
We finished and headed back up, closed up our suitcases and dragged them downstairs, and we checked out. The South Kensington tube station was sparsely populated at 9:45 on this Sunday morning, so getting to the platform and onto the train were effortless. The ride to the airport took just a little longer than I had hoped, and the walk to the ticket counter from the Terminals 1, 2 and 3 tube stop was much longer than I had anticipated. Checked in without any difficulties, we moved along through security with gate 16 our eventual destination, though the ticket agent said it could turn out to be a different gate, and that we should be sure to check the monitors.
Heathrow Airport has been cleverly set up with an eye for marketing. As you clear through security (they have a separate screening line where the only thing they’re checking is your shoes; you take them off and put them directly on the x-ray belt!), you are set free into a vast duty-free shopping area, with alcohol directly in front of you. And believe me, with the US Dollar as weak as it is against other currencies, duty free in England is no bargain!
We did hit the souvenir racks for one last go, and then we made our way to the gate. There was some minor confusion as we looked at one of the Departures monitors and saw a flight to Chicago at the correct time of 12:40 p.m., departing from gate 18. Final call! We walked very quickly to the gate despite the fact that it was still 11:50. I was quite certain United Airlines wouldn’t be boarding the plane nearly an hour before departure. We arrived at gate 18 only to learn that the Chicago flight was an American Airlines plane. Almost in a panic we rushed to gate 16 where, lo! and behold, our fellow passengers were leisurely waiting for the boarding time to arrive.
Soon we boarded and were on our way home. I usually don’t watch the movies on the plane, but I wasn’t particularly in the mood to write, and the guide’s description of something called “Hot Fuzz” intrigued me. I watched it and laughed my ass off! More on that in a later post…unless I forget.
I did indulge my writing hobby after the film. It is here that I must confess, as one who reads this – THE one who reads this – will probably have figured out by this point, that I wrote most of this journal much later than the events actually occurred. There just wasn’t time in the day to cover all of the London that we covered, and then write about it. The high-speed internet rate at the hotel was so exorbitant it was ridiculous, but the nearby internet cafes all closed at 11:00 p.m., leaving no time to write, choose pictures, upload them and post. So I’ve done most of that in the days following my return. I hope my reader will forgive me that.
The flight was like a traveler’s dream. Okay, I didn’t have a sizzling rendezvous with a voluptuous flight attendant in the back of the plane, but maybe your travel dreams are different than mine…. The flight departed on time, didn’t crash on take-off or landing, arrived early, the passport line moved very quickly, luggage was already on the belt, and Customs didn’t consider us a threat.
A’s parents met us outside Customs, his dejected sister pretending that she missed him. We traded brief stories about all the things that happened, and soon we were inching away, needing to get ourselves home. Finally, we said our good-byes, and we were a couple again.
Of course, a trip as pleasant as ours, from the day we left for London until the day we returned, can’t go completely without frustration, and this one waited until we were at our most tired, and at our most desirous to be home to strike us. Mrs. Farrago and I decided to take public transportation home. Usually that doesn’t call for an ominous overtone in the soundtrack. My only concern was lugging the suitcases onto and off of the Blue Line train, through the turnstiles, up two escalators and onto and off of a bus.
We wheeled the cases through O’Hare airport and, just before we got to the pedestrian tunnel a young black man in City of Chicago work clothes said, “The Blue Line is closed. Two cars derailed at Rosemont. You have to go to the shuttle center and catch a CTA bus.”
I said, “You’re kidding!” but, like sheep, we headed for the Bus and Shuttle Center. We got there and saw a huge crowd of people lined up at the door of a CTA bus, and I wasn’t about to try to get two fat suitcases onto it. So we went into the nearby Hilton O’Hare Hotel and asked the bellman to call a cab for us. He did, and he told us that cab number 3795 would be there in 10 minutes, but “wait inside here. It’s too hot outside.” In about 5 minutes a cab, number 3775 pulled up to the door of the hotel. It was too suspiciously close typographically to our cab’s number, and by the time I got past the urge to believe it was just a coincidence some people climbed into it and were whisked away. I decided to wait outside and, 10 minutes later I was more than convinced that our cab had been “stolen.” Mrs. Farrago suggested that we just take the next bus.
Just as I agreed, another bus pulled into the Shuttle Center lot, and there were very few people waiting for it. It kept rolling forward as a CTA assistant waved him on toward a parking spot. We caught up with it and, as the door opened, the assistant said, “They turned the Blue Line back on. You should take that. It’ll be faster.”
My frustration frothed. “We just came up from there!” I griped.
The assistant said, “Well, you can take the bus. It just goes three stops down the line, and you gotta get back on the Blue Line past where the problem was.”
“Yeah,” I groaned, “but with my luck, the bus will break down!”
The assistant just shrugged his shoulders.
Mrs. Farrago and I lugged our bags back down to the train station, through the turnstiles and onto a waiting train…which waited…and waited…and waited…for a full 35 minutes before the train driver announced on the P.A. that as soon as two incoming trains got into the station, ours would pull out. She kept making that announcement for the following ten minutes while people kept boarding and boarding and boarding to the point where our car was jammed in worse than sardines.
Finally the train began to move, but we crawled most of the way to the first station, where even more people got on. At the following station yet more boarded. It became apparent to me that the crowds were the result, mainly, of fans headed to the Cubs v. New York Mets at Wrigley Field. At virtually every stop between O’Hare and Addison Street (there are seven) no one left the car, and at most stops at least one more person wedged into the throng. I felt myself seething at the whole situation.
At long last we pulled in to the Addison Street station, and suddenly the car was bearable again! The next stop, Belmont Street, was ours. Fortunately the station attendant opened the wheelchair gate for us, so we didn’t have to deal with the suitcases at the turnstiles. At street level it was quickly obvious there would be no bus for a long time. Three other people were hailing cabs from a better vantage point than ours (though every cab was occupied!), but, thanks to the good, quick eye of Mrs. Farrago, we got one that dropped a passenger off at the mouth of the escalators, nearer to us than to the other taxi hopefuls!
In all it was a full three hours after we got off the plane before we finally got home. A quick trip to the bird-sitter’s and back made us one little happy family once more!
The End!
...A Parting Shot
You know something is worth a photo if the Asian tourists are taking pictures of it!
The morning came up too quickly, one because I hadn’t had enough time to sleep off Saturday night’s binge, and I had a headache; two because it meant leaving London. But the morning wasn’t going to cease its progress, and so I got up.
Within 45 minutes we three were all showered and dressed, and we headed down for breakfast, which seemed a lonely affair, as we were the only people from our group in the restaurant. At least my headache faded.
We finished and headed back up, closed up our suitcases and dragged them downstairs, and we checked out. The South Kensington tube station was sparsely populated at 9:45 on this Sunday morning, so getting to the platform and onto the train were effortless. The ride to the airport took just a little longer than I had hoped, and the walk to the ticket counter from the Terminals 1, 2 and 3 tube stop was much longer than I had anticipated. Checked in without any difficulties, we moved along through security with gate 16 our eventual destination, though the ticket agent said it could turn out to be a different gate, and that we should be sure to check the monitors.
Heathrow Airport has been cleverly set up with an eye for marketing. As you clear through security (they have a separate screening line where the only thing they’re checking is your shoes; you take them off and put them directly on the x-ray belt!), you are set free into a vast duty-free shopping area, with alcohol directly in front of you. And believe me, with the US Dollar as weak as it is against other currencies, duty free in England is no bargain!
We did hit the souvenir racks for one last go, and then we made our way to the gate. There was some minor confusion as we looked at one of the Departures monitors and saw a flight to Chicago at the correct time of 12:40 p.m., departing from gate 18. Final call! We walked very quickly to the gate despite the fact that it was still 11:50. I was quite certain United Airlines wouldn’t be boarding the plane nearly an hour before departure. We arrived at gate 18 only to learn that the Chicago flight was an American Airlines plane. Almost in a panic we rushed to gate 16 where, lo! and behold, our fellow passengers were leisurely waiting for the boarding time to arrive.
Soon we boarded and were on our way home. I usually don’t watch the movies on the plane, but I wasn’t particularly in the mood to write, and the guide’s description of something called “Hot Fuzz” intrigued me. I watched it and laughed my ass off! More on that in a later post…unless I forget.
I did indulge my writing hobby after the film. It is here that I must confess, as one who reads this – THE one who reads this – will probably have figured out by this point, that I wrote most of this journal much later than the events actually occurred. There just wasn’t time in the day to cover all of the London that we covered, and then write about it. The high-speed internet rate at the hotel was so exorbitant it was ridiculous, but the nearby internet cafes all closed at 11:00 p.m., leaving no time to write, choose pictures, upload them and post. So I’ve done most of that in the days following my return. I hope my reader will forgive me that.
The flight was like a traveler’s dream. Okay, I didn’t have a sizzling rendezvous with a voluptuous flight attendant in the back of the plane, but maybe your travel dreams are different than mine…. The flight departed on time, didn’t crash on take-off or landing, arrived early, the passport line moved very quickly, luggage was already on the belt, and Customs didn’t consider us a threat.
A’s parents met us outside Customs, his dejected sister pretending that she missed him. We traded brief stories about all the things that happened, and soon we were inching away, needing to get ourselves home. Finally, we said our good-byes, and we were a couple again.
Of course, a trip as pleasant as ours, from the day we left for London until the day we returned, can’t go completely without frustration, and this one waited until we were at our most tired, and at our most desirous to be home to strike us. Mrs. Farrago and I decided to take public transportation home. Usually that doesn’t call for an ominous overtone in the soundtrack. My only concern was lugging the suitcases onto and off of the Blue Line train, through the turnstiles, up two escalators and onto and off of a bus.
We wheeled the cases through O’Hare airport and, just before we got to the pedestrian tunnel a young black man in City of Chicago work clothes said, “The Blue Line is closed. Two cars derailed at Rosemont. You have to go to the shuttle center and catch a CTA bus.”
I said, “You’re kidding!” but, like sheep, we headed for the Bus and Shuttle Center. We got there and saw a huge crowd of people lined up at the door of a CTA bus, and I wasn’t about to try to get two fat suitcases onto it. So we went into the nearby Hilton O’Hare Hotel and asked the bellman to call a cab for us. He did, and he told us that cab number 3795 would be there in 10 minutes, but “wait inside here. It’s too hot outside.” In about 5 minutes a cab, number 3775 pulled up to the door of the hotel. It was too suspiciously close typographically to our cab’s number, and by the time I got past the urge to believe it was just a coincidence some people climbed into it and were whisked away. I decided to wait outside and, 10 minutes later I was more than convinced that our cab had been “stolen.” Mrs. Farrago suggested that we just take the next bus.
Just as I agreed, another bus pulled into the Shuttle Center lot, and there were very few people waiting for it. It kept rolling forward as a CTA assistant waved him on toward a parking spot. We caught up with it and, as the door opened, the assistant said, “They turned the Blue Line back on. You should take that. It’ll be faster.”
My frustration frothed. “We just came up from there!” I griped.
The assistant said, “Well, you can take the bus. It just goes three stops down the line, and you gotta get back on the Blue Line past where the problem was.”
“Yeah,” I groaned, “but with my luck, the bus will break down!”
The assistant just shrugged his shoulders.
Mrs. Farrago and I lugged our bags back down to the train station, through the turnstiles and onto a waiting train…which waited…and waited…and waited…for a full 35 minutes before the train driver announced on the P.A. that as soon as two incoming trains got into the station, ours would pull out. She kept making that announcement for the following ten minutes while people kept boarding and boarding and boarding to the point where our car was jammed in worse than sardines.
Finally the train began to move, but we crawled most of the way to the first station, where even more people got on. At the following station yet more boarded. It became apparent to me that the crowds were the result, mainly, of fans headed to the Cubs v. New York Mets at Wrigley Field. At virtually every stop between O’Hare and Addison Street (there are seven) no one left the car, and at most stops at least one more person wedged into the throng. I felt myself seething at the whole situation.
At long last we pulled in to the Addison Street station, and suddenly the car was bearable again! The next stop, Belmont Street, was ours. Fortunately the station attendant opened the wheelchair gate for us, so we didn’t have to deal with the suitcases at the turnstiles. At street level it was quickly obvious there would be no bus for a long time. Three other people were hailing cabs from a better vantage point than ours (though every cab was occupied!), but, thanks to the good, quick eye of Mrs. Farrago, we got one that dropped a passenger off at the mouth of the escalators, nearer to us than to the other taxi hopefuls!
In all it was a full three hours after we got off the plane before we finally got home. A quick trip to the bird-sitter’s and back made us one little happy family once more!
The End!
...A Parting Shot
You know something is worth a photo if the Asian tourists are taking pictures of it!
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