Category Archives: Family

Around the World ’25

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At times like this, in the funk that comes after a long trip, I ask myself, did I actually do that? An odd question, maybe, but long travels have that odd effect. Somehow such a trip seems less than real. Also more than real. Those are essential features of the intoxication of the road, and hangovers follow intoxication.

Ponder this: Over roughly the last five weeks, starting on February 8, in a series of eight airplane flights, a small number of intercity train trips on either side of the Eurasian land mass (including one of the fastest trains in existence), a large number of subway, streetcar and even monorail rides, a few taxi rides, other car rides provided by friends and relatives and a hired driver, a bicycle rickshaw ride — and you haven’t lived and almost died (or at least felt that way) till you’ve taken such a conveyance in Delhi — climbing a lot of stairs and using a lot of escalators and elevators, and taking more than a few long walks, and many short walks, on sidewalks and cobblestone streets and railway station platforms, I went around the world in a westward direction, from metro Chicago to metro Chicago, by way of Japan, India, the United Arab Emirates, Germany and the Czech Republic.

All that effort for what? To see the world, of course. That and skip out of much of winter in northern Illinois.

How did I have the energy for this, here at the gates of old age? How are the logistics possible?

But it really isn’t that hard. This is the 21st century, and travel is mostly by machine, and part of a mass industry, so even old men firmly from the middle class can go. Retired and semiretired old men, who find themselves with more free time than in previous decades. Moreover, the logistics were the least of it: all you need in our time is a computer to set things up.

I’m convinced that the hard part, for many people, would be finding the will to go. Luckily I have a practically bottomless supply. My always-eager-to-go attitude toward seeing point A and then points B, C and so forth also meant I was completely persuaded that buzzing around the world was a good idea. Tired as I am now — and boy am I tired — I haven’t changed my mind, though I need to rest up a bit at the moment.

Japan: my first visit in 25+ years.Rising Sun

It felt familiar — I did live there for four years — but the passage of time also infused the place with a feeling of the unfamiliar as well, a strange combo sensation indeed.

India: A major lacuna in my travels, now just a little less so.Indian Flag

A friend who goes to India sometimes on business told me last fall, “India makes me tired.” I might not have been on business, but I ended up feeling the same way.

And yet —  a phantasmagoria unlike anything I’ve seen, especially the teeming city streets. Teem was never more an apt verb, in my experience. Yuriko came as far as India with me, after we visited Japan and her family and friends there. Then she headed back eastward to Illinois.

I went on alone from India to the UAE.UAE Flag

In an even less familiar part of the world, a city of towers somehow rises on the edge of the Arabian desert. Just that is astonishing in its own way, but there is plenty else.

Then to Germany: An old friend I hadn’t seen in a long time, since about five golden weeks in my youth. A long, long time ago: the last time I was there, there were two Germanies and two Berlins and a Wall and the Stassi and Trabbis and a firm living memory of the cataclysm only 40 years earlier.German Flag

Berlin was the focus this time, where I joined my brother Jay for the visit. We’d been kicking around the idea of traveling there together for a while, and ultimately didn’t want to wait till either of us got any older. He had not made it to Berlin in ’72.

A major side trip from Berlin was to Prague. Not quite as old a friend, but old enough.Czech Flag

Yuriko and I visited in ’94, but it was new territory for Jay, another slice of the former Astro-Hungarian Empire to go with his early ’70s visit to Vienna.

Actually, when you visit a place you haven’t seen in 40 or 30 years, it’s like you’ve never been there. I had that sensation in both Berlin and Prague. The old memories are packed away, only loosely connected to their setting any more, which has changed partly beyond recognition anyway.

Now I’m back. Unlike Phileas Fogg, I didn’t return a day earlier than I thought I did (we have a stronger awareness of the International Date Line). But I did manage to miss the no one-likes-it spring transition to daylight savings time, just another little bonus of the trip.

Winter Hiatus

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Time to take the rest of the winter off. Not from living my life (I hope), but posting. Long enough to be a genuine hiatus: back in mid-March. Of course, it won’t really be spring in northern Illinois even then, but the odds of a blizzard will be low.

Where did that word come from, anyway? Hiatus, that is. Latin: opening, aperture, rupture, gap.

But I always like to go back a little further, if possible.

*ghieh-

Proto-Indo-European root meaning “to yawn, gape, be wide open.”

It forms all or part of: chaos; chasm; dehiscence; gap; gasp; gawp; hiatus; yawn.

Till then, a selection of items, in honor of the chaos and gawp of the next month or so.

I snipped this a few months ago when pricing a room. Maybe things have changed since then, though I doubt it.

Yea, a $90 room! Competitive with a motel. Wait, not so much. Why would I stay at a random peer-to-peer room unless it’s either competitive on price – the original deal with the tech, as I recall – or so interesting or well-located that it’s worth the extra fees? Talk about drifting away from what made the platform attractive, once upon a time.

A view from the Getty Center about 18 months ago. Wonder what I’d see now.

One more mid-century scan: my mother and brothers, before I was born, at the Colosseum in the mid-50s. Must have been a chilly day in Rome.

I stood there myself, maybe at that exact spot, but not till 1983. Call it the Flavian Amphitheater, my henna-haired high school Latin teacher Mrs. Quarles would have said. 

Once upon a time, as recently as the early age of photography, it looks like you could wander right in. Those were the days.

Have a Nice Trip, Sucker

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As scam text messages go, this one needs work. Mostly literate, but the tone is off.

I don’t think the tollway authority has a bit of girlishness in it. Or boyishness either, or any particle of human emotion. It functions as a machine: in its own small sphere, a calculating, persistent revenue-generating engine. Then again, I guess it’s fitting that the text message is likely machine produced.

That’s pretty heavy. Something a little lighter.

Floral studies by my father.

Mid-Century Slides

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Some years ago, I scanned some of my father’s slides from the 1950s and posted them, including family pictures in London, one of the lost and lamented Penn Station in NYC, and on the Texas coast in 1958. I didn’t lose interest, exactly, I just never got around to doing any more.

This time around my nephew Robert, who also visited San Antonio when we were there, took some of the slides back to New York for scanning, and later shared the results. I hadn’t seen most of them. Such as at Jay’s fifth birthday party, which would put it in 1957.

You could call it Mid-Century Birthday Party. Next, my brothers playing with balloons.

And the two of them in cowboy getup.

By the time I could remember, cowboys were becoming old hat. Spacemen were the thing, though I never dressed up as one (but I could have). The Woody-Buzz dynamic originated in that changing taste.

Texas ’25

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One way to deal with January, the grimmest month here in the frozen North (today’s high, 2° F.): adjust your latitude southward. Not everyone has that option, or really even that many people do. Humans get around, but we aren’t a migratory species. Anyway, I managed to travel recently from around 40° North to around 30° North and stay there for 10 days.

I flew from Chicago to Austin on January 9: from clear and chilly to overcast and not quite chilly enough for any precipitation to freeze. The flight path took us up and over an enormous winter storm passing south of Chicago at that time, whose southern edge expressed itself as cold rain in Austin. The storm made for spots of unnerving turbulence and some flight cancellations that day at places in between, such as Dallas, and a long descent into Austin Bergstrom through a gray soup. Hurray for radar.

On my return flight on January 19 out of Dallas — where I’d driven by then — I saw remnants of the earlier storm on the ground below. Somewhere over Missouri or southern Illinois that day, the ground still appeared white miles below, as far as I could see from my 737-800 perch.Post Snowstorm Midwest Jan 2025

Back in Chicago, there is very little snow on the ground. Dry January, indeed.

This was a family and friends trip, visiting more old friends than expected in Austin and San Antonio, including some I knew well in elementary school, meeting them in person for the first time in 40+ years, though I was on a zoom with one of them a few years ago. I’ve been making an effort to visit old friends for a few years now, because of mortality. Mine and theirs. People get a little weird if you say that part out loud, but I believe everyone feels the quiet ticking of the clock.

Also an Austin-San Antonio-Dallas trip, with a day in Corpus Christi thrown in for fun. Some places are like old friends you haven’t seen in decades, and so it was with Corpus, as Texans often call it. Not exactly a favorite destination from the old days, but I do have memories of high school speech tournaments at CC Ray and CC King (two Corpus high schools) maybe as recently as early 1979. I’m fairly sure Corpus was the first city except for San Antonio that I drove a car in, though that might have been Austin.

My brothers and I had lunch in the North Beach neighborhood of Corpus.Blackbeard's on the Beach

Seafood. The thing to eat on the Coast.Blackbeard's on the Beach

It was mostly an urban trip, but one fine day (nearly 60° F), old friends Tom and Nancy and I went to the suburban outskirts of Austin for lunch at the Round Rock location of the Salt Lick.

That too was visiting an old friend, in a way, though my fond memories are of the original Salt Lick in 1993, further out from metro Austin, in Driftwood, Texas, which is about as Hill Country as you can get. Still, the branch in Round Rock, with its long dining room and long tables and stone construction, seemed true to my memories of the original location. More importantly, the barbecue was just as good.Salt Like BBQ

Afterward, we took a walk in the historic district of Round Rock – our Round Rock Ramble – near the intersection of Main and Mays, among the finely restored late 19th- and early 20th-century stone edifices with names like the Old Broom Factory, the Otto Reinke Building and the J.A. Nelson Co. Building. Businesses of the 21st century seem to be doing well in these old two- and three-story stone commercial buildings, including the likes of Fahrenheit Design, Organica Aesthetics (a plastic surgery spa), Gharma Zone Korean Food and the Brass Tap.

Nearby stands an impressive old water tower in a small park (Koughan Memorial Water Tower Park, according to Google Maps and Wiki).Round Rock, Texas

The tower is yet another legacy of the WPA. Even better –Round Rock, Texas

– you can stand right under it, something that isn’t always possible when it comes to public water infrastructure.

Minnie the Cat

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Something new in the house, as of late November 2024.

Ann’s new cat, Minnie, rescued from the mean streets of Normal by an organization that specializes in just that. At about 10 pounds, as quiet as Payton the dog was noisy, at least when the barking mood struck. She seems to like her new residence, spending much of the days doing what cats do.

The I-90 Western States Road Epic

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I marvel that what Yuriko and I just did is even possible. Between Sunday, August 18, and Sunday, September 8, inclusive, we drove from metro Chicago to metro Seattle and back.

The kind of trip I call an epic. Which just means a long one. All together, we drove 5,916 miles across nine states. We visited cities, towns, remote farm and ranch land and forests, crossed plains, rivers small and mighty, hills, and mountain ranges. We visited our eldest daughter in far-off Washington state and reached the Pacific Ocean.

I call it an epic, but that’s only my idiosyncratic label. By historical standards, our trip was laughably easy. All we needed were some (but not a lot) of those three basic ingredients of modern travel in North America, and a fair number of other places: time, money and – perhaps the most elusive for many people, though of course the other two are often limiting – the will to go.

We did not need a supply train or pack wagons. We carried all the communications equipment we needed in our pockets. Food and fuel were easily purchased.

We did not need the permission of any authority at any level of government, beyond a drivers license or license plates, which aren’t specific to interstate travel. We paid no gang a toll, no one baksheesh to pass through their land.

We did not need to be armed. We encountered no hostility of any kind. Crime, of course, is possible anywhere, and I like to think we were careful. I was only really anxious about the possibility once, but even then nothing happened.

I’m positive that the greatest risk to life and robust health was the fact that we just drove nearly 6,000 miles over roads of varying size and traffic density, some of which were a bit hairy. I like to think we were careful about that, too, putting our combined 72 years’ driving experience to the task, and we got home with nary a dent nor a scratch, much less anything worse.

The epic was conceived and carried out in three parts of roughly a week each: the drive out west, the visit in the Pacific Northwest, and the drive back east. On that structure we hung four main events and many other smaller ones. And by events, I mean seeing places in three cases, and visiting family and friends in one. On the way out, we saw Glacier National Park. In Seattle, we visited Lilly and Dan, as well as two old friends of mine, Bill and Tom, and their spouses, but also spent a couple of days at Sol Duc Hot Springs at Olympic National Park. On our return, we saw Grand Teton National Park.

Some of the driving counted as a necessary chore, such as the route through Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota and ultimately Wyoming: I-90. If you want to, you can drive all the way to Seattle on I-90, a total of just a little more than 2,000 miles, according to Google Maps. We didn’t want to do that. We used I-90 to get to Wyoming and then Montana on the way out, and return from Wyoming on the way back. For us, that was two days’ worth of driving each way.

Once we got to Montana, we took smaller roads that crossed that state and Idaho and Washington state. On the return, we crossed another part of Washington, Oregon and Idaho, back to Wyoming, also mostly using smaller roads, except for a stretch of I-84. Those small roads sometimes provided exceptionally scenic driving, or driving through territory the likes of which we hadn’t seen before. And there was some fun mountain driving. By fun, I mean curves.

Going out, we reached the vicinity of Devils Tower National Monument after two days on I-90, and stayed there for two nights; next, Helena, Montana for a night; then a campground outside the St. Mary’s entrance of Glacier National Park for two nights. Spokane for one night; and into Seattle.

A view in Glacier NP.Glacier National Park

It would have been six nights in Seattle, but we spent one camping in Olympic NP in the middle of that week. The return began with two nights in Portland; a night in Boise; a visit to Craters of the Moon National Monument and then three nights near Grand Teton NP; one in Sheridan, Wyoming, and then back to the I-90 funnel back home.

A view in Grand Teton NP.Grand Teton NP

Squint and you can imagine randy Frenchmen of yore saw mammaries.

Letters, 1969

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The great volume of paper letters from my mother to me didn’t begin until I went away to VU, but there were a few before that, such as when I visited my aunt and uncle and cousin around the time of a certain historic event 55 years ago now.

Considering how old it is, the letter is in pretty good shape. Only slightly yellowed.

I believe Sue and Ken and Ralph had come to visit us in San Antonio in mid-July, and I went back with them for a visit to their home in Ardmore, Oklahoma, that happened to coincide with Apollo 11 landing on the Moon.

I’m positive we were driving to Ardmore on the 20th, because I remember hearing about the impending landing on the radio, and a discussion in the car about whether it would happen by the time we got to their house. I might have been eight, but I knew what was going on. I had watched the launch and was following the mission closely. As it happened, “Tranquility Base here, the Eagle as landed” moment was not long after we arrived at their house.

Moon walk or no, life on Earth goes on. My mother wrote another letter on July 27.

My mother said they were coming to pick me up on the 31st, as I’m sure happened. From there we took a driving loop around the South – from Oklahoma through Arkansas and Tennessee, reaching the northwest corner of Georgia before turning back and heading through Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana before returning to Texas.

The Great Southern Loop, I called it retroactively. Maybe 20 years later. Or the Great Southern Loop of ’69 even later, to differentiate it from the Southern Solo Loop of ’09 or the more recent ones of ’19 and ‘21. It’s hard to keep track sometimes.

Not a Ford Falcon, But Still Evoked Childhood Memories

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What’s that, I thought from far up the street. Possibly a Ford Falcon? Not a model you see much on the streets any more.

I got closer and no, it was a Chevrolet Bel Air. I’m not enough of a car aficionado to pinpoint the model year, but it looks early ’60s to me. Still not something you see much on our 21st-century suburban streets.

My grandmother drove a Ford Falcon. Shorter than the Bel Air, if I remember right, and somewhat rounder. It was the last car she owned, an early or mid-60s model. Again, I’m not enough of an expert to know the exact year, and it isn’t something I would have asked grandma.

I have scattered, but fond memories of riding in that car. It was gray and mostly, I believe, she drove (when I was with her) the short distances to shops she traded at, such as the Handy-Andy grocery store on Broadway in Alamo Heights, or to Brackenridge Park for my amusement.

Oddly enough, besides reminding me of grandma and the Brackenridge Park Eagle, the memory of that old car makes me also think of survivorship bias. There was no seat belt in the back seat, though the the front had lap belts. I usually rode in the back as a kid and, of course, survived the beltless experience. I consider this good fortune.

Some older people – my age, and I’ve seen it in writing – thus come to the conclusion that making children wear seat belts or other safety devices while in a car is merely the heavy hand of a nanny state. Hey, I survived my belt-free childhood in the ’60s! That’s an example of a statement that’s true but also dimwitted. Are there no children (or anyone else) in their graves from that period who would have survived had belts been in use?

June 23, 1991

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Saturday afternoon’s weather was perfect for those of us who like our good weather a little less placid. It was a warm and windy day, but not the sort of heat that is oppressive nor the sort of wind that threatens to blow anything down, just puffs that put leaves and branches in constant motion and mostly keeps mosquitoes away.

Heavy rain had fallen in the wee hours of Saturday, but few puddles survived in the daylight hours. Before midnight, more rain fell, but again on Sunday there was little to show for it. Temps moderated somewhat on Sunday, making for a warm day without much wind. Chamber of commerce weather.

I checked the reverse of this image — where I had make notes — and found to my surprise that it was taken 33 years ago today, at Jay’s house in Dallas.

Left to right, top row, described from my point of view, since I’m the one doing the describing: my uncle Ken, aunt Sue, Kim, my cousin Ralph (Kim was his first wife), my brother Jim, my nephew Robert, my brother Jay, sister-in-law Deb, her mother Eleanore. Left to right, bottom row, not counting the dogs: me, my mother Jo Ann, and nephews Dees and Sam. The dogs are Aloysius, Jay and Deb’s, and Katie, my mother’s, in her lap.

I had just turned 30 and was visiting the U.S. from Japan for the first time since my move, and we all gathered in Dallas. Pretty much the only good reason to visit Dallas in the summer is to see family or friends. Other stops on that trip included Chicago and from there a round-trip drive to Massachusetts for the Fourth of July, to visit friends, by way of Toronto and Niagara Falls.

Five family members in the image have passed away in the interim, seven counting the dogs. I’m not sure about Kim; she and Ralph divorced later. Four people in the photo went on to have (so far) a total of eight children, nine counting a stepchild. That would be me, Ralph, Sam and Dees. Also, the house we were standing in has been torn down and the site redeveloped.

What to say but tempus fugit? One question, though. Who took the picture? I don’t remember anyone else being there.