A Summery September Saturday in Lincoln Park

I can’t let International Talk Like A Pirate Day pass without a mention, as I have for so many years. Somehow, that would be wrong. There’s a place in the world for silly days. So here’s a public domain image for the occasion.

“The Capture of the Pirate Blackbeard, 1718” by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris (1920). He’s an American artist I wasn’t familiar with until recently. He’s been mostly forgotten, his style considered outdated.

Summer in its mildest form lingers here in northern Illinois: bright days, little wind, puffy clouds, temps that let you forget whether the air is hot or cold. Good for going out for a long walk (Saturday) or staying at home and sleeping late and then lounging on the deck (Sunday) and reading and watching various bits of visual entertainment.

The Saturday walk was through Lincoln Park in Chicago, from the southern edge northward, along the boardwalk and into the zoo, and back again along the ridge that used to be the lakeshore. I also passed through a crowd at a farmers’ market.

Been a while since my last visit. That too was a late summer stroll.

This time, Yuriko was at her cake class making this —

— which is every bit as good as it looks.

Meanwhile, I took a bus east to Lincoln Park, crown jewel of the Chicago Park District and home to fields and paths and trees and shrubs.Lincoln Park, Sept 17, 2022
Lincoln Park, Sept 17, 2022 Lincoln Park, Sept 17, 2022

But there’s no forgetting the surrounding city.Lincoln Park, Sept 17, 2022 Lincoln Park, Sept 17, 2022

I didn’t seek out monuments this visit. The park is dotted with them, as much in the background as the tree canopy or bushy undergrowth for most people, who are missing messages in bottles from the past.

I did pause at Hans Christian Andersen, whose bronze dates from 1896. It gave the impression that he was enjoying the shade.Lincoln Park, Sept 17, 2022

“The Hans Christian Andersen Monument Association [local Danes] commissioned John Gelert to produce the sculpture,” park district says. “A Danish immigrant, John Gelert (1852–1923) arrived in Chicago in 1887, receiving his first commission for the Haymarket Riot Monument two years later.

“Gelert portrayed the children’s author sitting with a book in hand and a swan at his feet, alluding to his world-famous story, ‘The Ugly Duckling.’ The artist explained that ‘he had the advantage of studying several good photographs of Andersen taken at various times in his life.’

“Gelert displayed the Hans Christian Andersen Monument along with his now-missing Beethoven Portrait Bust at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. (Installed in Lincoln Park in 1897, the Beethoven bust was stolen in 1970.)”

Elsewhere, in the shade of the Schiller statue, in fact, a small brass band did some tunes al fresco.Lincoln Park, Sept 17, 2022

On the whole, the walk was good.Lincoln Park, Sept 17, 2022

As I saw printed on the side of a truck parked on a street running through the park.

Thursday Grab Box

Lake Michigan was active but not stormy on Saturday. Views from Loyola.Lake Michigan 2022 Lake Michigan 2022

There’s a coffee-table book in this: chain-hung Chicago signs.
Devil Dawgs Chicago

High-res images, of course. Can go on the same coffee table with Austin neon.

Also Chicago. Specifically, on the street. Make that in the street: a Toynbee tile-like embedment doing its part to remind us of the beleaguered Ukrainians.

Recently I started reading Illegal Tender, subtitled “Gold, Greed and the Mystery if the Lost 1933 Double Eagle,” by David Tripp (2004). A remainder table find some years ago; nice hardback. As it says, the book tells the intriguing (to me) story of the 1933 Double Eagle, which tends to make lists of the world’s most valuable coins, along with the likes of the Brasher Doubloon, the 1804 Bust Dollar and the 1913 Liberty Nickel. Coins so special that their names are capitalized.

On that particular list, I hadn’t heard of the 723 Umayyad Caliphate Gold Dinar, but wow, what a name, with images of ancient treasure in distant lands woven right into the words. The 1913 Liberty Nickel was the MacGuffin in an episode of the original Hawaii 5-0. Namely, “The $100,000 Nickel,” which first aired on December 11, 1973.

“A rare 1913 Liberty Head nickel, one of only five ever made, is to be auctioned at a coin show held at the Ilikai Hotel,” says the imdb entry on the episode. “European master criminal Eric Damien gets con artist and sleight-of-hand expert Arnie Price freed from jail so that he can switch a cleverly-made fake with the original before the auction. But things do not go as planned, as Price, fearing capture, tries to dispose of the nickel in a news rack, and the chase is on to recover the nickel before anyone else finds it.”

Naturally, McGarrett and his men recover the nickel. I don’t remember that specifically, even though I saw that episode either that day or on repeat, but that’s a safe assumption for the denouement. I do remember that I’d heard of the nickel before, probably in a Coins or Coinage article.

I think the episode at least partly inspired one of the Super 8 movies I made with friends David and Steve in junior high, The $300,000 Dime, which I think involved Swiss operative Hans Lan foiling the theft of the titular dime. Sadly, this and the other Hans Lan story, The Assassin, plus the SF non-epic Teedees of Titan and a couple of others whose names I’ve forgotten, are lost as the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, except that no one cares.

The Madonna della Strada Chapel

Today would have been a pleasant day in February: rainy and in the 40s F. In May, you grumble: where’s my missing 30 degrees? The grass is lush and the trees are budding, but so what. When it finally gets warm, though, all will be forgotten.

After lunch on Saturday, I decided a good use of the afternoon would be to visit another sacred space I’d long known about, but never ventured inside, like the Chapel of St. James that morning. That meant an El ride north from downtown to the Loyola stop at the edge of the Rogers Park neighborhood, the northernmost bit of the city on Lake Michigan.

Years ago, I lived a few stops south of Loyola, and occasionally went there. Mostly to visit a bookstore on Sheridan just outside Loyola University’s Lake Shore campus — or was it two bookstores and a raft of other oddball retail? Looking around Sheridan now, there’s no trace of the late ’80s retail that once was there. That isn’t a surprise, but it’s a touch melancholic all the same.

Black Star was the name of the bookstore I remember best. An 1989 article in the Chicago Tribune noted: “Walk up a flight of stairs and you will enter a red and black labyrinth — two of the colors of the Holy Roman Empire`s coat of arms — containing thousands of used books, from dirt-cheap paperbacks to equally cheap hardcovers. There’s a tiny cafe in the back-six wooden tables surrounded by large ferns — where you can sip coffee and tea and munch on some pastries…

“Specialties: Psychology, religion, philosophy, literature, history, occult, art, language, film, romance, mystery, children’s, science, drama, science fiction. Particularly strong in the literature, philosophy and history of the European peoples.”

I bought a few books there. Just another lost bookstore now. I’ve known quite a few.

Back in the present, I walked through the Loyola campus and before long came to the Madonna della Strada Chapel, which is Loyola Chicago’s main chapel. Finished in 1939.Madonna della Strada Madonna della Strada

“The curving Art Moderne form is reminiscent of a small dirigible or airplane hanger,” the AIA Guide to Chicago says of the design by Chicago architect Andrew Rebori. “The walls of the apse are ‘accordioned’ — the folds filled with glass blocks, which admit slim slices of light. Names of famous Jesuits are crispy incised along the roofline; the tall tower is flat-topped and windowless.”

The entrance, which faces Lake Michigan.
Madonna della Strada

I’ve read that it was put there in anticipation of facing a northward extension of Lake Shore Drive, presumably all the way to Evanston, but that never happened.Madonna della Strada Madonna della Strada Madonna della Strada

The stained glass is artful. My pictures of it, not so much — that’s a hard thing to photograph, in my experience. Other artwork was easier to capture.Madonna della Strada Madonna della Strada

Martyrs on the wall.Madonna della Strada

To the left, for instance, is René Goupil, S.J., venerated as the first Jesuit martyr of Canada, who took a Mohawk tomahawk to the head in the mid-17th century. It was a tough posting.

The Chapel of St. James, Chicago

The main event on Saturday was lunch with two old friends, Neal and Michele, who live in the city. We ate at the informal dining room of the Union League Club in the Loop and then took an informal tour of the building, which dates from the 1920s and is alive with art on its walls and an elegant, sometimes sweeping, interior design. Informal tour means we wandered around some of the floors and looked at things. An enjoyable walk through with friends; and an in-person experience.

Michele and Neal, 1989.

Before I met them, I took the El to River North and walked to Rush Street. Eating and drinking establishments remain, but the street isn’t anything like it was 40+ years ago, I’ve read. By the time I visited Rush occasionally, starting in the late ’80s, most of that scene had evaporated, but I’ve had a few good meals on the street over the decades, such as a lunch — or was it dinner? — with Jay ca. 2002.

There we are.

One thing that would have been on the street 40 years ago is Archbishop Quigley Preparatory Seminary, a seminary prep school run by the Archdiocese. The school had a chapel. It still reaches skyward, but not as much as the nearby towers on Michigan Avenue. Chapel of St. James, Chicago

The school closed early in the 21st century, and these days the Archdiocese of Chicago occupies the space. The chapel — the Chapel of St. James — was dedicated in 1920, and hasn’t been changed at all since then, except for a recent thorough restoration that took 14 years.
Chapel of St. James, Chicago
Chapel of St. James, Chicago
Chapel of St. James, Chicago

A helpful docent showed us around. One thing she mentioned was that Zachary Taylor Davis did the design. He also did other well-known buildings, namely Wrigley Field.

“I wondered about that for a while, but then a person on one of my tours said, ‘They’re both places of worship,’ and I had to agree with that,” the docent said.

The chapel’s stained glass, which we got to see with the chapel lights off and then on, was patterned after that in Sainte-Chapelle in Paris. I’m pretty sure I visited Sainte-Chapelle, but the memory has faded.

My images are pale moons of the quiet luminousness of the windows.Chapel of St. James, Chicago

Pale moons will have to do. They stretch up toward near the ceiling, reminding me of the tall arrays of windows at Heinz Memorial Chapel in Pittsburgh. One wall features Old Testament stories. The wall behind the altar, New Testament stories. The other wall, church history.

Stormy Saturday in the City

On Saturday I spent much of the day in downtown Chicago, for the first time in more than two years, except for a short transit from Midway to Union Station returning from Savannah. Mostly, I’d just gotten out of the habit. Even though I got rained on sometimes — a drizzle some of the time — I was still glad to walk a dozen or more city blocks, ride the El a couple of times, and see what there was to see.

That morning I drove to a parking garage near O’Hare and took the El the rest of the way into the city. Late in the afternoon, I returned the same way. When I’d entered the subway in the city to board the train, the skies were gray and menacing, but the rain had stopped a few hours earlier.

A half-hour later, when the train emerged from a tunnel to run down the median of the Kennedy Expressway toward O’Hare, sheets of rain were pouring on the highway and tapping the top of the train car. Water streaked the windows. I could see wind moving barely green tree branches and bushes off the side of the road. Suddenly, everyone’s phones buzzed a tornado warning from the National Weather Service.

The car was about half full, so the sound of the alert was distinct, seemingly coming from all directions. You’d think there might have been some comment among the passengers about that, but everyone went on with their business — that is, quietly interacting with their phones.

By the time I got off the train and to the garage, the rain had slacked off. By the time I was about half way home on the roads between O’Hare and my part of the northwest suburbs, not only had it quit raining, but the sun peaked out from behind the clouds. I got home and found no damage or even very many large puddles. The storm had passed pretty quickly, it seems. It rained again later that night, but nothing like the violence of the afternoon storm.

At about 7:30, I looked out into my back yard and noticed a rainbow. Actually, a faint double rainbow.rainbow over the Chicago suburbs

Actually, a near-full rainbow.rainbow over the Chicago suburbs

Nice way to end a cold, wet April.

Chicago Avenue Stroll: Buildings & Murals

No chance to see the aurora borealis here in northern Illinois last night, even if it was there to be seen. Yesterday was overcast all day, producing light but steady rain late in the evening and throughout the night, as far as I could tell.

Today was overcast as well, with light snow in the morning and again in the evening. So much for March going out like a lamb.

On Sunday, which was chilly but sunny, I took a stroll down Chicago Avenue for a few blocks. Chicago is a major east-west street, crossing the city and into the suburbs and running more than 12 miles, according to a Google Maps estimate. The eastern terminus is at Lake Shore Drive, but not before you pass such notable places as Michigan Avenue, the Chicago Water Tower and the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Where I walked, roughly 2300 W. to 2000 W. Chicago — about four miles west of Lake Michigan — the street is the commercial hub of Ukrainian Village, though not everything on the street has anything to do with Ukraine or its diaspora. Such as Fatso’s Last Stand. That’s very Chicago; it could be just about anywhere in the city.Fatso's Last Stand

One of two locations of this name in Chicago, owned by an entity that has other restaurants and bars in the city, but also in New York and Charleston. I ought to try it sometime. I like a hot dog stand that has its own mural.Fatso's Last Stand mural

It’s on the wall facing Oakley Blvd., which crosses Chicago Avenue at that point. The artist, one Felipe Solorzano, has some images on Instagram. It didn’t occur to me until I looked at them that people pose in front of the wings. I’ve seen that before, but not in Chicago.

The wings form the center panel in a triptych of paintings, if that term is correct for murals. Anyway, there are three distinct paintings on the Fatso’s wall. I didn’t take a picture of all of them, but Google did.Fatso's Last Stand mural

The new mural is dated 2019. That synchs with the always-useful Street View, which tells me that the current mural appeared between June 2018 and August 2019. Before that, there was a different mural.Fatso's Last Stand

How to describe that? A Ukrainian-Custer-hot dog stand vibe. Perhaps the owners felt obliged to cancel Custer, though I doubt most passersby gave it much thought. In any case, the earlier mural appeared some time after October 2015. Before that, just a red wall.

Across Chicago Avenue from Fatso’s is another mural. I don’t have any information about its creator, but he or she has some talent.two women Ukrainian Village mural
two women Ukrainian Village mural

This one appeared between August 2019 and July 2021. I believe the mural vogue that seems to be under way in Chicago is a good thing. Spices up the city.

Elsewhere on the street, I took a look at some smaller commercial buildings, which are sinews of an urban neighborhood like Ukrainian Village: a shop on the first floor, an apartment or two or more above, perhaps where a shopkeeper used to live, and might still live in some cases. These buildings usually don’t command much attention, and maybe they don’t need to, but they can actually be fairly aesthetic. Chicago Avenue Chicago Avenue
Chicago Avenue

I like that small one, tucked in the middle.
Chicago Avenue

Another mural. Little information on this one either, but that’s hardy necessary to enjoy it.Chicago Avenue The Stoop mural

I see on Street View that the mural appeared between August 2019 and August 2021, the same span when the first floor of the building went from being occupied by a hair salon — knocked off by the pandemic, probably — to being a vintage clothing store called the Stoop.

Not on Chicago Avenue, but a block to the north on Rice St. I wandered by it as well.St Nicholas School of the Arts

This is home to St. Nicholas School of the Arts, which is affiliated with the St. Nicholas Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral. A cornerstone gives the building date as 1935, but that’s all I know. Handsome structure, though.

The Ukrainian National Museum, Chicago

Tucked away in an unassuming brick building, across a small street from Sts. Volodymyr & Olha Ukrainian Catholic Church in Chicago, is the Ukrainian National Museum.Ukrainian National Museum, Chicago Ukrainian National Museum, Chicago

High time for a visit, I thought on Sunday. It isn’t a large museum, but it’s home to a fair number of artifacts and a good amount of text and photos illustrating the history and culture of Ukraine. More than 10,000 items, according to the museum.

One of the museum’s rooms is devoted to Ukrainian Cossacks. Or, to use the Ukrainian transliteration, Kosaks. I have to admit I scarcely knew much about the difference among the various Cossacks, and even now I only know a little more, byzantine as the centuries-long subject is.

Here’s a small snippet from the — shall we say, complicated nature of Cossack history — lifted directly from the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine. It’s only a very small part of the whole picture.

With the permission of the Polish government Cossack regiments were formed in Korsun (Korsun regiment), Bratslav (Bratslav regiment), Fastiv (Fastiv regiment), and Bohuslav (Bohuslav regiment) under the command of Cossack colonels, headed by an acting hetman, Col Samiilo Samus from Bohuslav. But the actual head of the Right-Bank Cossacks was Semen Palii, colonel of Fastiv and Bila Tserkva; he led the Right-Bank Cossacks in their fight against Polish rule and oppression by the nobility and for the unification of Right-Bank Ukraine and Left-Bank Ukraine under the rule of Hetman Ivan Mazepa (the uprising of 1702). This unification was realized in 1704.

Portraits of Ukrainian Cossack hetmans hang on the museum’s walls, with detailed text about their deeds. In nearby cases are weapons, clothes, coins and other cool Cossack stuff. As interesting or admirable as the museum’s other items were, these were my favorites.

Another major room contains somewhat newer artifacts, including displays of ornate Ukrainian clothing and very many Easter eggs (pysanky) done up in that famed, colorful and intricate Ukrainian style. (Singular, pysanka.)

Again from the encyclopedia: “The pysanka (literally, ‘written egg’) is produced by a complex technique. An initial design on the egg is done in beeswax, which is applied to the surface with a special instrument called a kystka (a small, metal, conic tube attached to a wooden handle).

“The egg is then dipped in yellow dye. Then those elements of the design that are to be yellow are covered with wax and the egg is dipped in a red dye (sometimes two shades of red are used). After the surfaces that are to be red are covered with wax, the egg is dipped in an intense, dark dye (violet or black).

“So that the color will adhere well, the egg is sometimes washed with vinegar or alum before being dyed. When the design is completed, the egg is heated to melt off the wax.”

Other rooms featured more recent history. That of course means the awful history of Ukraine in the 20th century, most especially the Holodomor, which merits its own room, full of harrowing photos, testimony and statistics, and not forgetting where to lay the blame: Stalin and his henchmen.

I wasn’t alone in the room. A man and a woman, maybe a few years older than I am, expressed their surprise to a docent, who was also in the room, that such a thing had happened. They’d never heard of it. If I didn’t have some interest in the history of the Soviet Union — one of those places where the history was entirely too interesting for the well-being of its inhabitants — I might not have either, so I won’t judge them too harshly (though it’s easier to be a bit peeved at the apathy toward history education in this country).

But there’s always more to know. I didn’t know much about the subject of another room: Ukrainian immigration to other places after WWII. Most striking in that room was an enormous map, nearly from floor to ceiling, locating all of the Ukrainian Displaced Persons camps in the western zones of occupied Germany in the late ’40s.

There were more than 100 of them. Something worth knowing now that millions of Ukrainians have been displaced again.

“The Allies intended to repatriate all these victims of Nazi Germany and therefore organized them by nationality,” Jan-Hinnerk Antons wrote in Harvard Ukrainian Studies. “However, two misconceptions in their approach to the problem soon proved troublesome.

“First, the number of people refusing repatriation was much higher than anyone had expected. Second, nationality was by no means congruent with citizenship — and it was the latter that was assumed as the basis for repatriation.

“The very existence of more than one hundred Ukrainian Displaced Persons camps in the western zones of occupied Germany was testament to the Ukrainian DPs’ resistance to forced repatriation and their struggle for recognition of their nationality.”

Many of them eventually came to the United States. Including the family of the docent, a resident of Ukrainian Village who had been born in a DP camp. She told us her immediate family had survived the war, but many other relatives had not. Growing up, she said she heard about members of an extended family she never knew.

Finally, a much smaller room in the Ukrainian National Museum tells a less troubling tale: the story of the Ukrainian pavilion at the 1933 Century of Progress world’s fair in Chicago, the lesser-known cousin of the 1893 world’s fair. Remarkably, the structure was a project of Ukrainian immigrants in Chicago, and not sponsored by any government. Least of all the Soviet Union, which was busy murdering Ukrainians wholesale at that very moment in history.

St. Helen Roman Catholic Church & St. Volodymyr Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral

During my walk around Chicago’s Ukrainian Village on Sunday, I also visited four churches, two of which I’d been to before: Sts. Volodymyr & Olha Ukrainian Catholic Church and St. Nicholas Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral. Both have “stunning” and “striking” interiors, to quote myself from 2014, and were certainly worth another look.

A few blocks north of those two is St. Helen Roman Catholic Church, which has masses in Polish, Spanish and English.St. Helen Roman Catholic Church

“This Polish parish was formed in 1913, and in the early 1960s commissioned the present structure, which blends Art Deco, Modernism and tradition — with a Biblical fish motif,” Open House Chicago says, noting that the architects were Pirola & Erbach, who seem to have done a number of mid-century churches in Chicago.

When I arrived, a Polish mass was in progress. I made myself as unobtrusive as possible at the just inside the door, and admired the handsome interior.

“The spacious interior and ceiling are decorated to draw all eyes to the altar, which is illuminated by light coming through slits in the walls,” says Open House. “The stained glass contains mostly geometric patterns in small fragments of bright, unfiltered colors.”

Outside on a high pedestal, Jesus greets passersby on Augusta Boulevard.St. Helen Roman Catholic Church St. Helen Roman Catholic Church

Somewhat lower, but also on a pedestal outside the church, stands a bronze Pope St. John Paul II.St. Helen Roman Catholic Church

A little further north is St. Volodymyr Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral.St. Volodymyr Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral
St. Volodymyr Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral
St. Volodymyr Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral

Again I stood at the back, taking it all in. Not just the marvelous beauty of the interior, but also the exoticism (to my ears) of an Orthodox service in Ukrainian. The priest’s voice, from behind the iconostasis, carried vividly all the way to the back of the nave.

“The cathedral is a remodeled German Lutheran church that exhibits the Medieval-Gothic style of ecclesiastical architecture, including pointed arches, ribbed vaults and flying buttresses,” Open House says. “The cathedral brings an Eastern-Byzantine interior design into a German-Gothic temple.”

Indeed, an iconostasis and pews. I’ve run across that before.

Noteworthy on either side of the main entrance.
St. Volodymyr Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral

The older inscription, presumably put there when the Ukrainians moved into the Worthmann & Steinbach-designed former Lutheran church (1945), uses the transliteration Vladimir. The newer plaque, put there in 1988 to mark 1,000 years of Christianity in Ukraine, uses Volodymyr.

I expect Vladimir is going to be out of favor among Ukrainians for a long, long time. But in any case, it’s also an example of recontextualizing, rather than tearing a thing down.

Ukrainian Village Walkabout

On Sunday, I drove into the city with Yuriko, who attended her cake class in the Humboldt Park neighborhood and made some delightful orange pastries.Yum

While she did that, I had a few hours to kick around. Temps were only a little above freezing, but the sun was out and there wasn’t much wind, so it turned out to be a good day for a walk. So I went to the Ukrainian Village neighborhood to see, and document, signs of solidarity with the beleaguered people of that nation. There were flags.

Many flags.Ukrainian Village Chicago 2022 Ukrainian Village Chicago 2022 Ukrainian Village Chicago 2022

Banners and signs.Ukrainian Village Chicago 2022 Ukrainian Village Chicago 2022 Ukrainian Village Chicago 2022

Ribbons and bows.Слава Україні! Слава Україні! Слава Україні!

And more.Ukrainian Village Chicago 2022
Ukrainian Village Chicago 2022

The neighborhood is reportedly the home of 15,000 or so Ukrainians and the outpouring is highly visible. I could have spent all day taking pictures of blue-yellow bicolor displays.

Heaven on Seven No More

I learned over the weekend that the restaurant Heaven on Seven, closed since early 2020, has closed permanently. I will miss it. Before the pandemic, I went there once a year or so, even after I quit working downtown.

The joint had much to recommend it, but especially its first-rate Louisiana cuisine. Over the years I had the jambalaya, crawfish etouffee, gumbo, red beans and rice, fried oysters, crab cakes, various po’ boys and pies, and more. The New Orleans decor charmed without being overwhelming, and its seventh floor location at 111 N. Wabash in Chicago’s Loop (the storied Garland Building) had little signage to guide you there. You either knew where it was or you didn’t, especially in the days before the Internet. I can’t remember who introduced me to it, but it was sometime in the late ’80s.

Also, and I can’t stress this enough, the dishes at Heaven on Seven weren’t the creation of some big-deal chef who “curated” some “artisanal” cuisine using “local” ingredients “cooked to perfection” to reach some height of “authenticity.” All of that adds up to an overpriced place that people praise because a restaurant can’t really be good if you pay modest prices, can it?

No. At Heaven on Seven, talented cooks created wonderful dishes to remind you of those days and nights in New Orleans or even Lafayette, without inflicting high prices on its patrons.

Just as important, it was never a place to go alone.Heaven on Seven

Pictured are old friends Kevin and Wendy, whom I met there a number of times for enjoyable lunches. That time was in 2013.