For a few weeks now, we’ve enjoyed a Mediterranean-like climate here in northern Illinois, at least the warm and dry summers. Sometimes hot, but usually just warm, and usually dry, though we’ve had occasional showers.
We’ve had more at-home meals al fresco this year than any time I can remember. It can’t last. But at least it will for the next week or so.
Till then, it’s a mild balm for the worldwide pervasive melancholy, if you happen to be around here.
Thirty years ago, I spent much of my first summer in Japan wandering around the Kansai, the part of the country focused on the Osaka-Kyoto-Nara-Kobe megalopolis. On August 18, 1990, I sent a postcard featuring the Kinkaku-ji to San Antonio. This is the card. I never made such a good image of the place. Or any image that I remember. For much of the time I lived in Japan, I had no camera.
Dear Jim,
My latest trip to Kyoto took me here… It’s a Zen temple. The gold color is gold leaf. The only thing the postcard doesn’t depict are the swarms of tourists behind the pavilion, each with a camera….
Dees
This is actually the Kinkaku, the Golden Pavilion (kin means gold), which is a major part of the large Kinkaku-ji temple complex (ji being a suffix meaning temple), which is formally known as Rokuon-ji.
Everyone sees the Kinkaku-ji. It’s like taking a look at Big Ben or the Eiffel Tower. That happened to be the first of a number of times I went there on a day trip, usually in the company of a visitor from the U.S.
The Golden Pavilion is often mentioned in the same breath as the Silver Pavilion, Ginkaku-ji, gin meaning silver, also in Kyoto. That too was a place to take out-of-towners.
Over the years in mid-August I’ve sometimes spent time in the back yard after midnight, looking up for the Perseids. Not a lot of time, since my sleep habits are fairly regular, and the washed out suburban skies aren’t the best for any kind of observation. So usually I don’t see much.
Just after midnight today, Thursday — about a day after peak — I saw one bright meteor whiz by Cassiopeia. Nice.
A recent Zoom.
Two in Washington state, two in Tennessee, and one in Illinois. There’s another social Zoom tomorrow night for me, involving an entirely different group: besides two in Illinois this time, there will be three in Georgia, including some people I haven’t seen in about 20 years.
I’m using a free Zoom membership, which specifies only 40 minutes per meeting. Yet so far there has been no time limit for me. I figure that’s like the old dope peddler giving out free samples for a little while.
The Perseids and dope, at least one kind of it, bring to mind “Rocky Mountain High.” It’s a lovely song and a paean to the Colorado Rockies, which certainly deserve one. I understand that watching the Perseids while up in the mountains was part of John Denver’s inspiration for the song.
Colorado Rocky Mountain high
I’ve seen it raining fire in the sky
Then of course, there are these lines:
Friends around the campfire
And everybody’s high
Denver denied he was singing about anything as crass as chemical enhancement under a sublime firmament. Those friends were just high on nature! But I believe he was bending to popular prejudice at the time, saying what he felt he had to say.
One other thing about the song, its least likable aspect. Early in the song, a young man comes to the mountains: He was born in the summer of his 27th year. I’ll take him as a stand-in for Denver. That’s fine. Discovering new places that touch your soul counts as a good thing. Later, however, the song bemoans people moving to the area: more people, more scars upon the land.
I’ll give Denver the benefit of the doubt when it comes to conservationism. I’m sure he was genuinely concerned about the state of the environment, especially the mountains he loved. Yet the song pretty clearly contains the following sentiment, even if unconsciously on Denver’s part: it’s OK for me to be here, but not you.
Ontarioville, Illinois, is the geographic equivalent of a ghost sign on the side of a building. Its history is detailed by Neil Gale of the Digital Research Library of the Illinois History Journal. Enough to note here that it was a 19th-century town, but it didn’t prosper in the 20th century for various reasons, not enough to remain a distinct entity. Now Ontarioville is the name of a neighborhood in northwest suburban Hanover Park.
One bit of residuum from the town is the Old Ontarioville Cemetery, located on an unattended slice of land between the driveway to a water reclamation facility and the parking lot of the Grace Orthodox Presbyterian Church.
It only has a scattering of stones, mostly obscured by grass in August and illegible anyway.
Some have almost completely worn away.
But not the Schick stone.
Or the Harmening stone.
Fred Schick (d. 1933) owned a general store in the community in the early 1900s and was postmaster besides, so it seems likely that Schick Road, a thoroughfare not far to the south, was named for him. He rests in the weedy cemetery with his wife Sophia, who lived to 1952, and his son, who died at 17 in 1920.
Heinrich Harmening (d. 1903), here with wife Dorothea (d. 1924), seems like a somewhat bigger fish in this small pond, apparently owning a prosperous dairy farm and building a large house on what is now U.S. 20 (as pictured in Gale’s article). I must have driven by it many times without noticing, so one fine day I might go looking for it, if it’s still around.
“A line of severe storms slammed through downtown Chicago and surrounding areas Monday, downing trees and power lines, which sparked fires in the city, officials said,” CNN reported last night. That, and there was some riotous looting too.
“More than a million homes and businesses in the Midwest are without power, including a third of all of customers in Iowa,” CNN continued. “The wind was so strong when the storm passed through Perry, Iowa, it blew pieces of boards from other buildings into the walls of a house.”
So we lucked out. As I mentioned, the winds were fairly tame in my tiny corner of the world. After such wind and rain as we had had passed yesterday, I went out in the yard to pick up items that moved around a little, such as one of the deck chairs. The sun had returned and I noticed the rain-speckled hibiscus picking up the light.
Today we opened up a box that has been sitting in our laundry room for a good many years, tucked under a few other boxes. I call it a laundry room, but being home to the washer and dryer is only one of its functions. Crap we don’t want to put partly out in the elements — in the garage, that is — goes there.
On Saturday, since this is a Summer of Nowhere, I spent a fair number of hours in the garage, till the trash bin was mostly full and garage crap had been rearranged somewhat.
Back to the box. Among many other things, it contained five Zhu-Zhu Pets. Mechanical hamsters, since I’m not sure they rise to the level of robot hamsters.
Ann marveled at them. Her 17-year-old self reflected on how important they were to her seven-year-old self. She got her first one for that birthday. Like most toys, they were important until they weren’t.
What amazed me was that the batteries have held out on all of them. They all still move around and make various preprogramed noises.
That’s about 20 seconds of randomly selected Zhu-Zhu Pet sounds, squeaks and whirs coming directly from 2010 to you in 2020.
Not something you particularly want to hear.
That’s the local siren that goes off during severe weather, with wind and cicadas in the background, sounding at about 3:45 this afternoon. I don’t actually know its official meaning, but my interpretation is, watch out for tornadoes, bub. So I did, at least through the north-facing windows of my home office, with occasional peeks southward.
We got a fair amount of rain and some lightning for the rest of the afternoon, though I’ve seen worse. As of early evening, we’ve been visited by no tornadoes or even damaging winds. In fact, by 6 the sun was out again. Just another passing summer storm, though we haven’t seen many this year.
Years ago I knew an Englishman, a Mancunian if I remember right, who was living temporarily in Nashville. One of the things that impressed him about America — frightened him, sometimes — was the violent thunderstorms, he said.
That gave me pause. It was hard to imagine not having much experience with that kind of weather. Guess the UK doesn’t get quite as many thunderstorms as North America, especially in the north part of the country, though of course sometimes the British Isles do get thumped by winds (such as in 1987, the reason we couldn’t visit Kew Gardens the next year). Massive thunderstorms were definitely a part of growing up in South Texas, especially come spring, and living in both Tennessee and Illinois.
During our long drive to the Canadian Rockies and back in the summer of 2006, we made a stop on the return in Bismarck, North Dakota (and Zap, too). Mainly to see the state capitol — my kind of sight.
Outside the building is a statue of John Burke, 10th governor of North Dakota and Treasurer of the United States for all of the Wilson administration, among other offices he held in the Progressive Era. My kind of sight as well — and my kind of whimsy to have Lilly, age 8, pose with it.
It’s a duplicate of a bronze by Utah sculptor Avard Fairbanks, put in its current place in 1963. Looks pretty good for being out in the Dakota winters for so many years. The summers as well, since I remember that day in Bismarck was pretty hot.
Note the hat covering one of Burke’s feet. I just noticed it the other day, looking at the picture. It’s my Route of Seeing cap, given to me by Ed. I told him I would take pictures of in various places, to send to him. I wonder whether I remembered to do so in this case (I was wearing it in the Zap picture as well).
Forward to 2011. We went to Washington, DC, that summer. Part of the visit involved a tour of the U.S. Capitol. Where is the original Fairbanks statue of Honest John Burke? There.
Naturally I had Lilly, now 13, stand next to it. Bet not many non-North Dakotans can say they’ve posed with both, and probably a fair number of North Dakotans haven’t either.
The image didn’t come out so well, but so what. By then I wasn’t carrying around Route of Seeing, though it’s still tucked away with our other caps somewhere. Maybe I’ll take it somewhere again. (More likely, I’ll forget.)
Some unusually cool days this week. I’m not sure whether that had anything to do with what happened at about 7:45 pm on Wednesday out on our deck. I was sitting out there, decompressing from a day of work and other tasks, when I saw a dark blob hit one of our deck loungers. Twack!
Two cicadas. Noiseless, though the cicadas have been doing their twilight bleating for a few weeks now. Crickets are also singing after dark, though maybe not as strongly as they will closer to their seasonal demise. By Thursday morning, when I next checked, the cicadas were gone.
Happy to report there’s a thin mosquito population this year, at least around here. Flies have taken up the slack. Seems like one gets in the house every day through the back door, including some of the metallic-colored ones that used to fascinate me as a kid.
Also in the back yard: blooming hibiscus. Could be Hibiscus syriacus. I can also call it rose of Sharon, though I understand that’s applied to other flowers as well.
At Starved Rock State Park recently, I spotted his plaque near the lodge. Looking its century-plus age, including countless touches of Lincoln’s nose.
“Commemorating the deeds of the Union veterans of the Civil War,” it says. The Ladies of the Grand Army of the Republic erected it in 1914. Looks like the Ladies, who are still around, were trying to keep up with the Daughters.
Chronicling a lot of violence, but also a thing of great beauty.
Our most recent episode of Star Trek: “A Piece of the Action.” I suggested it as one of three options — an action/adventure story, or one of the show’s tendentious eps, or comedy. Ann picked comedy. I’d forgotten how much of a hoot “Action” is, with the high jinks gearing up especially after Kirk and Spock got into pseudo-gangster duds and Shatner hammed it up.
Tucked between an equipment rental shop and a truck accessories store on Irving Park Road in northwest suburban Roselle is Trinity Lutheran Cemetery. It’s also known as Freinenigreit Cemetery, according to a number of sources, including Find-A-Grave, but not any signs at the cemetery itself (that I noticed).
The alternate name speaks to the German heritage of this part of the Chicago suburbs, and the names of some of the earlier permanent residents reflect that as well: Botterman, Engel, Freitag, Geistfeld, Habermeier, Hattendorf, Reuter and Schmidt.
It’s a small slice of a cemetery, about 300 burials, many of which are recent. Those names tend to be more varied: Abraham, Burkinshaw, Dunbar, Ek, Hernandez, Pastori, Smakal and Tumminaro.
A nice design for a simple stone.
For an infant, born and died in 2004.
This one caught my attention.
I looked up Jake. A bright lad, just a little younger than my oldest child, who died suddenly of an undetected heart condition.
During our Saturday walk at Spring Valley Nature Sanctuary, we wandered into the Illinois Heritage Grove, which is section of the sanctuary devoted to native woody plants. A mini-arboretum.
The last time I spent any time there was in the fall, when things looked a bit different: 
Summer. Roughly the same view of part of the oval path through the grove.
For now, the grove’s bushes and trees are garbed in greenery. Such as the American plum (Prunus americana).
The hackberry (Celtis occidentalis).
The elderberry (Sambucus canadensis).
Remember, your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries.
