Paper

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Sometimes I think about writing paper letters regularly again. Something like once or twice a month maybe, just short notes to different people I used to correspond with that way. Even those of us who used to create voluminous amounts of paper letters – and I did – don’t do so any more. I keep up the volume of postcards, but not letters. I toy with this idea, but nothing has come of it yet.

That came to mind rummaging through my letter files recently. I found this.

Twenty years ago, my 78-year-old mother in Texas writes to her six-year-old granddaughter in Illinois, whose 26-year-old self happens to be visiting us now. I don’t think my mother sent an email or text message in her life, and she was no worse for it. I’d say as long as this paper letter and others of hers are accessible to those of us who knew her, her memory is no worse for it either.

Payton the Bassador, ca. 2009-2024

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Today was the sad day we had our dog, Payton, put down. In the end, it was quick and painless. The time had come. She couldn’t even move much as of the weekend, refused all nourishment during the last few days, and howled in pain for minutes at a time. Dogs don’t have many advantages over people, but not having to suffer as much at the end of their lives is one they do have.

“Payton” by Emi S. (2023)

She had been with us nearly 11 years, and came with the name Payton. We couldn’t decide on a new name, so that’s what it remained. Back when we got her, if you Googled “Payton” and “bassador” – for she was a basset-lab mix – her image would appear at the web site of the organization we acquired her from, with a banner on the pic announcing ADOPTED.

I got it in my head, soon after she came to live with us, that if I published her name and picture, whoever gave her up might see it, track us down, and demand her back. Not likely at all, but as a result I got into the habit of simply referring to our dog or the dog, beginning from day one. This is the first time I’ve used her name.

In the fullness of time, I may post other images, maybe even a short video of elderly Payton guarding her food a few weeks ago, back when she had an appetite. For now, enough to pause for a few days in her honor, till next Sunday. She wasn’t people, but she was a member of the family.

RIP, Payton.

A Palatine Water Tower in its Blue Period

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On short Sunday, we made our way to Palatine, Illinois, in the afternoon. As home to more than 67,000 residents, it’s no small chunk of northwest Cook County.

Those residents need water.

I’d driven by that water tower on the Northwest Highway (US 14) periodically for years, and decided it was high time I took a look while standing still. Once upon a time, up until 2016, the tower was painted to look more like a stereotypical lighthouse, including figures that evoked the sort of windows you might see on a lighthouse. That was done away with, but it’s a pleasant blue.

Another source tells us that it is an “18,000 ton water tower,” but not whether that’s without water or the weight of the water that it can hold. Wouldn’t the capacity of water towers be in gallons? It is, at least according to Watermedia.org.

Not far away, but tucked away from any major street, is the village hall.

Looks newish, as indeed it is: completed in 2016 by Camosy Construction.

I couldn’t go inside. Maybe that’s where the distinctive civic details of Palatine are, such small memorials or plaques or the like? There was nothing outside that I could see, unless you count this.

The mayor’s parking spot, within view of Wood Street, named for a resident of early Palatine (founded 1866). The mayor, since 2009, happens to be James Schwantz, a former pro football player.

I&M ’21

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This is the day of the year, at least here in the U.S., when people get mildly irritated at the change of the clocks, because it is mildly irritating. (And traffic death stats are trotted out.) By late in the evening, everything’s just a little askew, but that goes away as the week progresses. Maybe early March is too early to switch, but do away with it all together? I’d still rather have those long summer days not end till 9 or 10 p.m. Even better, not have them ever begin at 4 a.m. or earlier. Call me picky that way.

A path I walked along about three years ago, during my visit to the storied Archer Avenue.

To the left in the image is the Illinois & Michigan Canal, relic of 1830s canal mania.

A rail line ran nearby too.

I’d make some comment about how the railroad made I&M obsolete, but that’s only partly true. The nearby Sanitary & Ship Canal eventually took its place, and is no relic. Rather, it’s a legacy of the heroic era of civil engineering (let’s put that between the Civil War and WWI), and is a waterway of commerce to this day. I&M is recreational.

Thursday Cha-Chings

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Ann came home for spring break today. I offered to subsidize her expenses on a romp somewhere, even a mild sort of romp like my spring breaks of yore, such as to cloudy St. Petersburg, Florida, where we stayed at the condo belonging to the grandmother of one of our party (she wasn’t there) and found one of Vaughn Meader’s Kennedy records stashed away in her record collection. But Ann preferred to come here.

Remarkably, the fellow who produced The First Family in 1962, one Bob Booker, is still alive at 92, at least according to Wiki. Of course, he was only 31 then.

Saw this phrase at a supermarket recently, on banners hanging from the ceiling. Cha- ching!

The point in this case was to persuade shoppers that the store offers low, low prices. Save some cha-ching here or some such. I think most people understand that the phrase refers to cash register noise, and thus hard cold cash in one way or another, but it made me wonder how many people any more have even heard a cash register make a sound like that?

Because I am of a certain age, I have. I’m pretty sure the dime store I patronized ca. 1970 still had mechanical registers. But that was long ago, and even then the sound was a little old-timey. Now even the smallest stores in the nation’s remote backwaters use electronic registers, whose signature sound is a muffed beep-beep-beep that’s weak tea when it comes up to conjuring up images of drawers full of money. And yet cha-ching! lives on. Just another shiny bit in the jewel cave of English.

One more pic from Devon Ave. in Chicago on Sunday.

The mural is just outside the entrance to Cary’s, the bar I went to. As far as I saw, this was the only reference to Alice in Wonderland around. Why is it there? Why not?

Street View tells me that this small mural is a recent addition, too. It wasn’t there the last time the All-Seeing Eye passed by in November 2022. The bar’s wonderful neon sign has been there longer, appearing sometime between August 2007 (the first image available) and May 2009. That was a period of economic disruption, so maybe the bar did well enough to spring for the sign.

This from the NYT today: “President Biden has selected his education secretary, Miguel Cardona, to be the so-called designated survivor during Thursday night’s State of the Union address, a grim moniker meant to ensure at least one decision maker survives if a calamity were to wipe out the nation’s leadership assembled at the Capitol for the speech.”

Grim moniker, huh? Journalism might be a sickly industry, but journalese turns of phrase live on. Hard to imagine anyone actually saying that.

As for the office, the Secretary of Education is 15th in line to become president (vice president being first), which means that “designated survivor” is probably the only ghost of a chance of succeeding to the top spot, without the usual rarefied politicking of a presidential run, that the Secretary of Education has.

How long has that been a cabinet-level position? Right, the first one was during the Carter administration. Carving Education out of Health, Education and Welfare was, in fact, a campaign promise that he was able to keep, for what that was worth.

Magic Places

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First thing to do today is Remember the Alamo.

There’s been a recent uptick in bogus comments here, which I almost always delete, along the lines of (this example, verbatim): Thanks for a marvelous posting! I genuinely enjoyed reading it, you could be a great author. I will be sure to bookmark your blog and will eventually come back later in life. I want to encourage continue your great writing, have a nice day!

The “author” is usually listed as some service- or product-oriented operation, occasionally lewd but more often personal accessories of some kind, with a gmail address. To recall Buck Turgidson, I’m beginning to smell a big, fat AI rat.

I hung up the last 2024 wall calendar the other day, fourth of four in the house. One might think that illustrates my procrastinating ways, since we’ve burned through a sixth of the year already (the crummiest sixth, I should add). But no, I hung an accurate calendar there around New Year’s. The 2018 Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago calendar.

The year’s different, but so what? The first two months were the same as this year, but that changed on February 29, so I needed another calendar to avoid confusion, a year in which March 1 is a Friday. The most recent leap year to fit the bill (besides this year) would be 1996, but I didn’t seem to have one of those around or, oddly, any other calendar that qualified. No worries, I saw a wad of ’24 calendars at Ollie’s not long ago and picked one of the lot for $4, compared with a list price of $17. Nice discount, and I get 10 months at 40 cents each, instead of 12 months at about $1.40 each. Not much you can buy for 40 cents these days.

It’s a Plato calendar, an imprint of BrownTrout Publishers, which asserts that it is The Calendar Company. I had to look that up: headquartered in El Sugundo, California, BrownTrout published 1,500 unique titles as of 2020, according to the latest press release boilerplate issued by the company (recommendation, put a few newer releases on your site, BrownTrout). The site also says the company is the largest calendar publisher in the world, and it may be so, if that means calendars sold. Or does it mean days put on paper?

The one I bought at Ollie’s is called Magic Places. Handsome Rocky Places might be more like it. Mostly it pictures extraordinary rock features, natural and partly man-made, the kind of flawless and painterly pics you get from this kind of calendar, including sites in Scotland (three), England, Turkey, Greenland, Russia, and more. The likes of the Old Man of Storr, Cappadocia, Machu Picchu and Hegra in Saudi Arabia. One month wasn’t rocky but a monumental tree in Epping Forest in Essex, which I vaguely had heard of, but didn’t really know.

Just shows that Greater London is so vast, not even a month there is enough to hear of everything, especially in the days before the Internet. Once a royal forest, these days Epping is owned by the City of London Corp., even since – this isn’t hard to guess – the Victorian period.

Magic Places is a good-looking trilingual calendar, including Spanish and French as well to cover North America, and it has most of the standard holidays: U.S., Canada and Mexico civic, Christian, Jewish and Muslim, along with those days peculiar to American calendar-making tradition, such as Ground Hog Day, April Fool’s Day and Grandparents Day. There are also Low Countries holidays, which I suppose is a good market for the calendar maker.

It made my day to learn that besides being Cinco de Mayo, May 5 is Bevrijdingsdag in the Netherlands, Liberation Day. A holiday to celebrate ousting Nazis is one we can all get behind.

Wendy at Cary’s

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Heavy rain and thunder last night, big puddles today and cool air, though no freeze. The first crocus is out. It actually bloomed just ahead of the rain.

My goal on Sunday was to make it to Cary’s, a bar on Devon Avenue on the northwest side of Chicago. I made it. As bar neon goes, this one’s the top, put it in the Cole Porter song.

Mask décor inside. Pixar: there’s a movie in bar masks that talk while the bar is empty. Cary's

Mostly, though, it’s a Chicago bar.Cary's Cary's

The bar stands out in the area, because much of the surrounding neighborhood is South Asian in character and it isn’t. Nearby establishments include Lahore Food & Grill, Hyderabad House, Pak Sweets, New Bombay Hair & Beauty Salon, Devon Gurdwara Sahib of Chicago, Musk & Oud (gift shop), Amar Carpet, Chandni Exclusive (bridal shop), Mehrab Supermarket, and many more.

Back when we lived in Chicago, in both the late ’80s and mid-90s, we’d seek out Indian food in the area, but I hadn’t been there recently. Not much seems different these days, despite the sizable expansion of the South Asian population here in the suburbs: on an unusually warm March evening, Devon and the nearby streets were alive, a constant churn in and out of the shops, along the sidewalks and out into the streets, where cars had a tight fit. I’d have wandered around Devon on foot more on Sunday, but I arrived only in time for the beginning of the show at Cary’s, because of the aforementioned detour en route, and the fact that parking is near impossible on Devon, and almost so on the streets around it, whose spaces are restricted mostly to residents.

I went not because I go to bars that much, but to see my old friend Wendy (even when this picture was taken in ’87, I’d already known her about five years), who was slated to play guitar and sing. On stage, she’s Jenn. I also got to see the opening act. He and his band — a bass player and a drummer — were also quite good, though Dylanesque isn’t quite how I’d describe him musically, though he’s got that the Dylan in Greenwich Village look on the poster, at least.

Wendy only plays in public occasionally, and I’d never heard her more than noodle on the guitar. I’m glad to report she plays guitar very well, and has a fine singing voice, though her lyrics were sometimes hard to hear over bar noise. Still, she was especially lilting in holding long notes seasoned by her Nashville background: that cut through the noise.

I told her these things afterward. I was glad I didn’t feel compelled to politely lie to her about her talent because, fortunately, she had some.

Years ago, in the summer of ’82 in fact, other friends and I went to a Nashville bar, I forget which one, to see a fellow one of us knew slightly, an aspiring musician, who had invited us for an open mike night. He was, I think, a waiter or bartender, but of course, every other waiter or bartender in Nashville aspires to musical success.

He must have aspired more specifically to be like Glenn Fry or Don Henley, but was a failure. Just didn’t have enough in the way of musical chops; even we could hear that. We were polite about it, though. I wonder whether that was doing him a disservice, but I expect in the fullness of time, he found out.

Queen of All Saints Basilica

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The latest run of warm days is now ending, with rain moving through northern Illinois. In its wake, more seasonable temps for early March. Sunday wasn’t seasonable at all, with the air heated to a pleasant low 70s F.

On Sunday afternoon I headed for the the northwest side of Chicago. You’d think that would be straightforward, considering that I was coming from the northwest suburbs, but no: O’Hare takes up a sizable chunk of real estate between those two areas, and there’s no going under it like in Los Angeles. One goes around.

I was sure I didn’t need to consult a map, either. Go more-or-less east on a major road (Irving Park) that curls along the southern edge of the airport; go north on another major road that is just east of the airport (Mannheim); and then connect with the east-west road (Devon) that would take me to the part of the city I wanted to visit.

Easy, especially since I knew the first part of the route well. I often take those first two roads to the airport entrance. True, I had to go a little further north on Mannheim into less familiar territory to connect with Devon, but all I’d have to do is watch for Devon. So I did.

No, that wasn’t it, but it’ll be soon. No, that’s not it either, maybe the next major light. No, not that one. Maybe one more. No. We’ve all done this: expect something while driving, sure that it will come up soon, and it doesn’t. So I pulled over to check my map, finally, and I was some distance north of where I want to be. Mannheim doesn’t actually connect to Devon. The next major north-south street east of Mannheim, which is River Road, does. Oops.

Use the GPS, you say. I still say no. I wasn’t going to be late for anything that needed my punctuality, for one thing, but more important, I passed through a stretch of relatively unfamiliar and interesting territory as I navigated my way southeast to Devon. Metro Chicago is so large that that’s possible even after living here for decades.

Had I not been “lost” I would never have noticed this along the road.Queen of All Saints Basilica Queen of All Saints Basilica

I’d happened across Queen of All Saints Basilica in the Sauganash neighborhood of Chicago, one of the three minor basilicas in the city. I might have seen it on a list of local Catholic sights some time, but I didn’t remember it and didn’t set out to see it. But see it I did, though it was already closed. The exterior had to do.Queen of All Saints Basilica Queen of All Saints Basilica

Completed in 1960, so I’m surprised it isn’t more modernist. But I suppose the diocese wanted neo-Gothic, and that’s what architects Meyer & Cook provided. That firm seems to be better known for the art deco Laramie State Bank Building, also on the western edge of Chicago. While Queen of All Saints is certainly impressive, what if the diocese had asked for an art deco church?

Clary’s Cafe ’22

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Clary’s Cafe in Savannah is apparently an institution, boosted by a mention in both the book and movie versions of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. More than that, it serves up good food at popular prices.

“The stalwart Clary’s, which over the past century has evolved from a drugstore with a lunch counter into a knickknack-strewn café, serves a
classic old-school breakfast,” says Garden & Gun.

We arrived for lunch on our first full day in Savannah, enjoying the warmth of an early March that Illinois had not been providing. We didn’t end up at Clary’s, eating lunch at one of the handful of outside tables at Clary’s, because it appeared on a list of the 10 best breakfasts in the South or 10 storied Southern diners or the 10 most creative eggmeisters of Southern nouvelle cuisine.Clary's Cafe Savannah

Instead, after our walking tour, and a quick look at Wesley Monumental United Methodist Church, I consulted Google Maps for places to eat, looking for something simple and filling. Clary’s was only a few blocks away and seemed to fit the bill.

Though we ate outside, I took a quick look around inside, en route to the bathroom.Clary's Cafe Savannah

I don’t know about knickknack-strewn, but I can say that the food was simple and filling, though I can’t remember exactly what I had. One of those breakfasts for lunch, but I forgot to do the modern thing and take a picture of the plate and send it to a dozen friends.

21st-Century Leaps

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Another February 29. If I counted right, my 16th. That got me to thinking, just how many February 29ths have there been? As in, ever? Not as simple a question as all that, first of all because the day Caesar inserted into the calendar was an extra one after the equivalent of our February 24, a situation that persisted for a long time. So a different question might be how many intercalary days have there been since the Julian calendar’s first (let’s say first one after the extra days tacked on 46 BC, the longest year in history).

I feel like I’m staring into a pretty extensive rabbit hole. So, I’m backing away.

2020

Last time around on February 29, no entry. I attended an exceptionally pleasant dinner party at an exurban San Antonio ranch house, on flat land in the direction of the Hill Country. Six of us, I think, eating and drinking a few glasses of wine and conversing. People wonder whether the art of conversation is dying, and I doubt it. But it might go underground.

Also, that was the last social gathering I attended until April ’21 counting ones with family members, and June that year that for groups of friends.

2016

“The saying represents something exceptionally easy, of course, but even so I’m not sure it would be.” I wrote. ”Let’s assume the barrel is full of water as well as fish. Unless we’re talking about really large carp or some such, you might disturb the water and scare the fish, but I’m not sure how many small fish would actually be hit. Also, you’d think that shooting would soon destroy a wooden barrel and cause a dangerous amount of flying debris. Or if it were a metal barrel, such as a steel oil drum, the danger of ricochets might be high.

“This is something for the Mythbusters fellows to investigate, but I suspect that shooting fish in a barrel never was anything but a metaphor, and by now a hackneyed one at that. So I’m reluctant to say that making fun of a press release I received recently — especially the first line — is like shooting fish in a barrel. But it cries out to be mocked.”

2012

“I’m sure that I learned about Leap Year at an early age, like most people. But I never knew the details — Caesar and Sosigenes, the longest year in history (46 BC), Julian and Gregorian calendars, etc. — until I read The Clock We Live On. [I forgot to mention that Isaac Asimov wrote it? I’m rectifying that now.]

“The inside cover has an example of my father’s handwriting, something I don’t have too much of, so I wanted to save that too. Apparently he bought it in 1963, the year before he died.” [Sixty years and a day ago. RIP, dad]

“I first read it in 1977. Besides the story of the western calendar, there was plenty of other interesting topics — why days have 24 hours and hours 60 minutes, the development of clocks and chronometers, the establishment of meridians and time zones, and so on. The calendar chapter formed the basis of an oral report I did in high school Latin class.”

2008

“Battlefield gore is a necessary ingredient in any war movie of our time, as well as soldiers’ profanity, and understandably so. My own preference in historical fiction runs to verisimilitude, but that isn’t to say that I didn’t like The Sands of Iwo Jima.

“The most effective horror-of-war scene in Flags involved off-screen gore. At one point, one of the men (Iggy) goes mysteriously missing from the hillside. Later, his comrades discover that the Japanese pulled him into one of their caves and killed him in a way the American soldier who found him would only describe as, ‘look what they did to the poor son of a bitch.’ At that point one of the characters is looking at whatever remains of Iggy, but we don’t see it, and it’s much more horrible that way.”

2004

“Leap Year brings to mind the lore of King Numa reforming the early Roman calendar, Julius Caesar (and Sosigenes) replacing lunar with solar, Caligula trying to name a month after Germanicus (at least according to Robert Graves), Pope Gregory ordering his change but the Protestant parts of Europe ignoring it, and so on.

“When I was a kid I was fascinated by calendars, and would draw my own sometimes. In high school, I read about the history of the calendar on my own time, because it wasn’t part of any class. Even now I have some interest, though not as much as a fellow I know who spent time calculating the dates of Easter in the far distant future — thousands of years further than the standard Easter tables. I think he even wrote a computer program to do that for him.”