Category Archives: Family

The Trans-Pecos & Llano Estacado

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Back on April 14, I headed for Texas by car. I spent most of following two weeks in that state, arriving home today. Along the way, I drove 3,691 miles and change.

The main event was the wedding of my nephew Dees and his betrothed Eden on April 21 at Hummingbird House, a gorgeous outdoor wedding venue just south of Austin in the full flush of a Texas spring. An actual warm and green spring, unlike the cold and still brown spring I left in Illinois.

Rain had been predicted for the day, as it often is this time of the year, and there was an indoor pavilion just for that circumstance, but the Texas spring accommodated the bride and groom and wedding party and all the guests by not raining. If fact, the sun came out just before the ceremony, which was picturesque as could be.

I was remiss in taking pictures of Dees and Eden or anyone else, except for a few shots of my family.They’d flown to Austin the day before the wedding, in time for the rehearsal dinner, which was a pizza party in Dees and Eden’s back yard. The logistics of my family getting to Austin were a little involved, but everything worked out.

As for me, I’d spent most of the week before the wedding with my brother Jay in Dallas, arriving in Austin the Thursday before the wedding. The morning after the wedding, a week ago now, Yuriko, Lilly and Ann and I drove to San Antonio, where we all visited my mother and brother Jim. They flew back home that evening, leaving me to drive back to Illinois.

I wanted to return a different way than I’d came, especially since I had the week off from work (the week before the wedding was a work week). So I didn’t pick the most direct route home.

Namely, I drove west from San Antonio to Marathon, Texas, a town of a few hundred people in West Texas whose main distinction is its proximity to Big Bend National Park, which I visited last Tuesday. There are many impressive things to see there, but I was most astonished by the cliffs on the Rio Grande that form Santa Elena Canyon.

The next day I went to the Trans-Pecos towns of Alpine, Marfa and especially Fort Davis. Not far from Fort Davis is the McDonald Observatory, which I’ve had a mind to visit for years. It was cloudy and misty and a little cold when I got there, but that doesn’t matter when you’re looking at impressive telescopes. In Fort Davis itself, I visited the Fort Davis National Historic Site.

The next day, I drove north, through Midland-Odessa and Lubbock and finally to Amarillo, a shift in scenery from the desert of the Trans-Pecos to the high plains of the Llano Estacado. Along the way I made a few stops: the Presidential Archives and Leadership Library in Midland and the Buddy Holly Center in Lubbock.

While in Amarillo, a city I had not seen since a brief visit in 1979, I took the opportunity on Friday to see Palo Duro Canyon State Park, which is about 30 minutes outside of town. It’s a great unknown among natural areas in Texas and, for that matter, the United States.

I had enough time that day after visiting Palo Duro — the days are getting longer — to drop by and see the Cadillac Ranch, famed oddball tourist attraction, which is on the western outskirts of town.

This weekend was a long drive home: Amarillo to Lebanon, Missouri, on Saturday (I’d stopped in Lebanon the first day out, on the way to Dallas), and Lebanon to home in metro Chicago today. Tiring, but I did squeeze in two more sites. In Claremore, Okla., on Saturday, I saw the Will Rogers Museum. Not bad for an entertainer who’s been dead more than 80 years.

Today I stopped just outside St. Louis and took a walk around the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site. Not bad for a culture that’s been gone for about 800 years.

Ann at 1111

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No store-bought birthday cake this year for Ann, at her request. Her mother made a cheesecake.

It was good cheesecake. We didn’t have a numeral 5 candle. You’d think we would, considering my age, but no. So the numeral 1 stood for a decade, the smaller candles for years. Ann was OK with that arrangement.

I thought of, but forgot to suggest, that the numbers be in base 2, which would be 1111. There’s no reason to use base 10 for birthday candles other than the dead hand of decimal tradition, after all.

A Christmas Carol, Suburban Chicago Version

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Metropolis Performing Arts Centre is an excellent mid-sized theater that would fit in anywhere in the city, but it happens to be in suburban Arlington Heights. We went to see a production of A Christmas Carol there on Saturday.

Another nice detail: they produce paper tickets. This was Ann’s.
The soulless ticket cartel might be eager to get rid of paper tickets, but venues ought to be eager to keep them. People keep them, especially if they show was good. They’re cheap long-term bits of marketing.

Ann had never seen A Christmas Carol on stage, and neither had Yuriko. The last time I saw it was also at the Metropolis — almost exactly 10 years ago, when I took Lilly.

This production had everything it needed to have, particularly an actor (Jerry M. Miller) who could handle Scrooge’s dour initial disposition that slowly melts to his inevitable conversion to altruism. A Christmas Carol without that is a limp rag indeed.

Since it’s based on a novella, and not a source play, stage versions are going to differ, as the movies do. There was more singing and dancing in this version than others I’ve seen. Each of the Christmas spirits got a song-and-dance by a troupe, for instance, which was pleasant enough. This version also featured Bob Cratchit as the story’s narrator, which was a little odd.

A couple of important lines were omitted. Lines I think are important, that is. Old Fezziwig, who seemed reasonably prosperous — he had apprentices, after all — but who also knew that life was about more than making money, got none of his lines. He was mentioned in passing by Scrooge, and he got to dance, but that was about it.

“Yo ho, my boys!” said Fezziwig. “No more work to-night. Christmas Eve, Dick. Christmas, Ebenezer. Let’s have the shutters up,” cried old Fezziwig, with a sharp clap of his hands, “before a man can say Jack Robinson.”

When faced with the Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come, Scrooge didn’t ask it a most important question.

“Before I draw nearer to that stone to which you point,” said Scrooge, “answer me one question. Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that May be, only?”

Just quibbles. Now I’ve done my bit to introduce my children to the Dickensian part of Christmas. If you’re going to celebrate the holiday in this post-Victorian world, you should know it.

Twenty Times Around the Sun

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Lilly is home for Thanksgiving and, though a quirk of the calendar, her birthday.
You could think of it as a special birthday, but only because we use base 10. The evening’s feast was sushi. Here’s Lilly taking a picture of it.
Maybe you can’t be 20 on Sugar Mountain, but there are a lot more interesting places to go in later decades, metaphorically and literally.

Toul 1956

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Why my parents picked Toul, France as a destination in May 1956 is probably lost to time, since I doubt that my mother remembers. I’ve read that there are impressive old fortifications there, and a cathedral worth a look, so perhaps those were considerations. There used to be a NATO air base near the town, but my father was in the Army, not the Air Force, and probably didn’t visit on official business. Maybe someone they knew recommended the town for a look-see.

Anyway, they went. Many years later, I came across this slide my father made in Toul. Fortunately, he wrote down the place and time. Otherwise, I’d have no idea beyond it being somewhere in France.

ToulMay56

I think it’s most interesting because it captures an ordinary street scene in a French town more than 60 years ago, though the cathedral is in the background. Looking at image — peering back in time and far away in place — I notice certain details: the proliferation of telephone wires, the relative lack of parked cars, and the two figures beside the street: a schoolboy and a man.

Back when schoolboys were known by their short pants, it seems. I don’t know much about French fashion habits, but I suspect that’s long gone. Looks like the man is telling the boy something, maybe even dressing him down for something. Impossible to say.

Maybe the boy is still around, about 70 now. A grumpy old Le Pen voter? Again, I don’t know enough about France to know whether Le Pen captured the grumpy old man vote, though somehow I suspect she did.

I played around with Google Streetview for a little while today, looking at the area around the cathedral in Toul, though I didn’t get a precise fix on exactly where my father stood when he took the picture. Maybe I could, if I didn’t have anything else to do. I will say this: it looks like there’s been a fair amount of redevelopment in the area since 1956, and the telephone wires, probably the height of la modernité at one time, are gone.

Sometimes I try to capture street scenes myself. Here’s one in Shanghai in the spring of 1994, near the Bund.
Shanghai94And one of State St. in Chicago, looking north. Just last month.

State Street April 2017Looks ordinary now, but it might look a little odd in 60 years.

Dogs Over the Decades

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Our dog’s been with us four years this month. I won’t post another picture of her, photogenic as she is. I have other pictures of dogs I’ve known, or met.

The first dog I remember — barely — was Caesar.CaesarIt’s impossible to tell in this early ’60s-vintage picture, but he had a spot of pink fur next to his nose. At least, that’s what I remember as a very small child. Being a dog that roamed parts of semi-rural North Texas, he encountered (so I’m told) a nest of young rattlesnakes one spring, and that was all for him.

This is my grandmother in the 1950s, holding a young Georgette.GrandmaandGeorgetteI remember Georgette well. She lived with Grandma in San Antonio until the late 1960s, when the dog died of natural causes. Caesar was one of her pups.

Jay and Deb’s dog Aloysius, with the young family in 1983. I met him a number of times during ’80s visits, when my nephews were small.AloysiusTheir dog Brynna. I think I took this picture during our visit for Thanksgiving 2001.
CollegiatePose-BrynnaJay’s current dogs, Holly and Chloe. I get to visit them when I go to Dallas. They spend a lot of time in this particular spot in the living room.Holly ChloeAnd of course, Katie. The dog my mother had when I was in high school and beyond, 1976 to 1992, to be exact. This was the small dog that got a hold of a big bag of doughnuts, a half dozen or so, and ate them all. They didn’t stay eaten.KatieMy friends Rich and Lisa in Massachusetts had an Irish wolfhound in the 1990s named Charlotte. I remember her well during our visit for New Year’s 1993.CharlotteMy friends Ed and Lynn in Arizona had Bosco, whom we met during our visit in 1997. He knew some tricks, but I can’t remember what they were now.Bosco1997Late in his life, Ed had an elderly dog named Bert living with him in Washington state. Ed sent me this picture ahead of my visit in 2015, to show how much fur Bert shed.Bertandfur2015My friend Tom in Austin has a dog called Roscoe. He’s fond of jumping on you when you come into the room.RoscoeLilly’s friend Rachel has a dog called Riley.RileyFinally, one cat. In Osaka, Yuriko used to have a cat named Michael. Picture ca. 1994.Michael

I got along with him all right, mainly because he was fond of lying around like a dog.

A Teen Birthday, ’17 Edition

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Put this in Tempus Fugit file. Ann celebrated her 14th birthday on Friday night, here in the pit of a not-too-awful winter and a few days ahead of the actual event.

For contrast, see an image from 13 years ago. For a different contrast, from five years ago.

Here’s the cake itself, before implements of cake-destruction were taken to the task of dividing it into manageable pieces.
birthday cake

Not exactly mass consumption, but enough to satisfy.

Enjoying the Snows of Yesteryear

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Light rain fell early Thursday morning — I heard it during the wee hours — but by morning, the ground was lightly touched by snow. That ultrathin coat of snow lasted until Saturday and then vanished. For now, we’ve got a brown winter.

Not so most Januaries. Such as in mid-January 2012, when I happened to catch Lilly in the back yard enjoying the snow.
Jan 17 12Jan 17 12Jan 17 12I might be wrong, but I don’t think she took that hat off to college.

Tannenbaum ’16

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We acquired a Christmas tree last Thursday afternoon, but not at the usual place, a roadside business that’s a nursery during the warm months. It sells Christmas trees and firewood this time of year, but when we went, only a handful of forlorn trees were on the property, and no proprietors seemed to be around. If we were less honest, we probably could have nicked a tree, but then again the leftovers were just that. Maybe they’d sold their better stock before the recent snows and blasts of cold air.

So we did the modern thing, and Lilly looked for Christmas tree lots on Google Maps. The nearest one was about a half mile away. Just a dude from Michigan in a trailer parked on a strip center lot with a modest selection of trees — no pretense of supporting a charity — though better than the abandoned lot. Got us a tree about a foot shorter than usual, but with a nice shape, and for only $35.

Before long, the tree was in the living room, but we didn’t get around decorating it until Saturday. Looks about the same as every year. I put on the lights.
Christmas Tree 2016

The girls put on most of the rest of the ornaments.

Lilly and Ann Dec 2016We had some extra strings of lights, bought last year on the cheap after Christmas I think, so we strung some on the plants in the foyer.

Christmas lights 2016

That isn’t the same as every year. First time.