This is one of those periods where I really have the urge to write something, but nothing meaningful comes to me. I have the few personal projects that have lain dormant for a long time and, thanks to my attitude, will remain so indefinitely. (One is in research hiatus…waiting for me to make some phone calls and/or visits.)
And so I write here nothing meaningful. I'm left but to journal…poorly.
Last weekend I paid a visit to my father, though via a circuitous and reminiscent route. I decided to drive through the sadly dilapidated town I used to call home, and stopped at Hi-Way Bakery, just around the corner and on the other side of the next block from the house in which I grew up. For as long as I can remember, Hi-Way Bakery has made these unbelievably scrumptious chocolate covered cinnamon rolls – not too sweet, not too chocolatey*, and oh, so good – that have at times been the object of my obsession. The place has changed hands only a couple years ago, from the original(?) owners, the DelCotto family (unsure of the spelling), to a middle-aged couple who seem to really have a passion for the business, but are staring down the barrel of bankruptcy due to the local poverty; the town is made up these days only of the elderly and the very poor young, neither of which has any disposable income to speak of. I wish I could have bought every last pastry in the place to help the guy out, but I know I would have only eaten the chocolate covered cinnamon rolls….
From there I drove over to the home of my father's brother, Joseph (Giuseppe), and his wife Angela, or, more colloquially, Uncle 'Chooch' and Auntie Ange. 'Chooch' recently had his own brush with death, as a doctor was overmedicating him with a blood anti-coagulant, which caused internal bleeding and… well, suffice it to say that 'Chooch' almost bought the farm. And he can barely walk, due to his diabetes, and to the fact that he has seldom left the sofa in his living room since he retired 25 years ago.
When I left there I decided, while eating the first of two chocolate covered cinnamon rolls I had bought, to drive past Dad's place and head down to the speck of a town called Sherburnville, just a stone's throw from the Indiana border, about 60 miles due south from Chicago. According to an old obituary that we found among my mother's keepsake possessions after her death, Sherburnville is where my maternal grandfather was buried in 1968. As my mother was estranged from her family for most of her adult life, I know very little about my grandfather. What I do know I learned from other family members or from preserved records; Mom rarely spoke of him.
Oddly enough, as I learned a few years ago, it is through Mom and, of course, her father that I, along with my siblings and their children, am a Mayflower Descendant! More on that in another post, perhaps, but I have seen the family tree linkage! Somewhere in the centuries which intervened between a fortuitous marriage in colonial New England and the birth of my mother in 1928, the family went from relative riches to literal rags, from white linen to white trash. But I think Mom did a good job climbing out of that heap, marrying a respectable, self-motivated, if not-yet-self-employed man (never mind that they "had to" get married!), and I only have vaguely revealing traces of white trash in me. I mean, I have in the past lived in a single-wide trailer.
But I digress. I had been to the cemetery at the church in Sherburnville before, but I had not been able to find my grandfather's grave marker. This time I made sure to look for other cemeteries. I looked in Sherburnville, first, at the same cemetery, but again I was unsuccessful, and began to believe I was in the wrong place, or worse, that the information I had was erroneous. I headed to another church, another cemetery plot, where I encountered an old woman whose father used to be the pastor at this particular church. I asked her if she knew the area, particularly Sherburnville. She confessed she wasn't too familiar with Sherburnville. I told her of my quest, and she suggested I contact the local area historian, and gave me his phone number. As I left the church parking lot, I called the man and left a message on his answering device.
I drove back to Dad's place where I spoon-fed him his favorite soup, and a McDonald's strawberry shake, the only types of food he will eat. After a short visit, which included a brief pissing contest with Dad's asshole roommate who watches golf incessantly and at high volume, and who cranked his TV's volume to 11 when I turned Dad's TV on so he could watch The African Queen at a volume he could hear, I left. With a tummy full of soup and milk and cream, Dad was sleepy again. Rather than sit and watch him snooze, I let him sleep in relative peace. (Asshole roommate had been convinced to turn down his volume when an orderly threatened to go get a nurse.)
On the way home I (ate the other chocolate covered cinnamon roll!) received a phone call from the local historian with whom I had left the earlier message, and he had found my grandfather! I was looking in the right cemetery after all, but in the wrong place(s)! My next visit to that cemetery will be on a sunny warm day.
Monday I flew to Houston for what turned out to be a rather fun shoot on Tuesday. A corporate VP for a client company whose annual meeting is approaching had agreed to appear in a spoof documentary about the lost city of Atlantis (the meeting this year is in the Bahamas) as all of the "expert" interviewees – a bald man with a serious overbite, a very stout woman, and an Einstein-ish professorial type! They had hired a professional theatrical make-up artist who did a fantastic job on the skullcap and the characterizations in general. The guy in the video is not an actor, though he clowns around quite a lot, doing impressions and character voices for the pleasure of his friends and colleagues, so he fit right in, blending into the characters seamlessly. Despite the fact that it was fully a twelve-hour day, it was much fun…until we had to leave on Wednesday. It was a 6:22 am flight, for which we had to leave our hotel at 3:40 am. UGH!
When I arrived at the office – at 10:00 – I had to jump right into a script revision for Thursday's shoot for the Despised Product. Then, when I revealed to a freelance technician that I was shooting in our studio the next day, he shifted into foul-mood. When I asked him what the problem was, he told me that Thursday was the only day he had available to him to dismantle said Despised Product, an activity which would interfere with our shoot, and vice-versa. After learning how much more it would cost to reschedule the freelance shooter and the actor to Friday, I then asked the technician what the Thursday shoot meant to him. He said he would have to try to knock out most of the dismantling on Wednesday afternoon. Since it was my communication failure to let everyone know about the Thursday shoot, I volunteered to help him dismantle Despised Product. I left the office at 6:30 pm.
And I returned to the office at 7:00 am the next morning to help the shooter set up and prep for the shoot. We finished setting up with a couple of hours to spare until the noon call time for the actor, so I ran an errand to pick up a hand-prop for the actor, a "miniature model" of a car that was actually a radio-controlled toy Corvette.
The actor showed a little late, but, after a few lighting tweaks and wardrobe choices, he proved to be an absolute dream to work with! Many live presentation actors use what is called an ear-prompter. It's just a mini-tape recorder that he reads his lines into and then plays it back into a tiny earphone. He then speaks along with his own voice, and it looks and sounds like he has memorized pages worth of monologue! It's one of those things that relatively few people can do, and even fewer can do well. This guy was fantastic! He made the shoot very easy to get through, and he incorporated suggestions very well. Certainly worth the small fortune we're paying him. Maybe.
After helping the shooter to strike all the lights and the backdrop, and then cleaning up the rest of my mess, I left the office at 7:00 on Thursday. I was physically exhausted, after my extremely long days Tuesday and Wednesday and the early wake-up on Thursday, plus the mental exhaustion of directing a shoot (it sounds funny, but it does take a lot out of a person!), and I quite literally passed out on my bed at 10:00, feeling like I had truly accomplished something.
All day Friday I was dragging my ass around the office. Despite getting a full eight hours of sleep, not counting apparently being awaken briefly by the earthquake that shook Illinois, I felt like I could have used another 4 hours!
Next week I have to hand the Despised Product project – the supervision of the edit – back to my boss, as on Tuesday I am helping my sister to facilitate Dad's move from his nursing home to the Illinois Veteran's Home, and on Wednesday I fly to Phoenix for a three-day shoot with a client.
As I say "UGH! What a long week!" surely you must be saying "UGH! What a frikkin long, boring post!"
And yeah, I got it. Stop calling you "Shirley."
*I know… you're saying, "How could anything be too chocolatey?!"
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