Tuesday, December 3, 2019

How I Met Your Mother: December 3, 1983

Hey kids, did you ever wonder about the time before you existed? That dark and dreamless sleep from which you emerged all slippery and screaming and gulping air? Can you imagine that your parents were once young like you, full of plans and hopes and desires? And is it just a bit frightening to think that we were once strangers, randomly encountering each other during a Christmas season that made you possible? An evening that went like this:

I thought the long anticipated evening would go as planned, but one phone call changed everything.

A rented black tux was not my usual style, but I was the master of ceremonies for a work Christmas party. A pair of black and white checkered shoes and a Santa hat…now that was more like me. I carried them in a plastic grocery bag for later use.

            “Sorry to cancel at the last minute, but I’m afraid I just can’t go, I’m so sick,” came the call just minutes before leaving the house to pick up my date for the evening. 

A week earlier I asked her, “You wanna go to my company Christmas party with me? I could use a date. The women I work with have never seen me with anyone.”

            “Ooooh that sounds fun,” she said sarcastically, but then paused and added, “So is it formal or what? What should I wear?”

            “I’m wearing a tux, but kind of as a joke. It’s at the Courtier Club in Park Ridge.”

So, on the night of the party, dateless, I was open to having a no-strings good time, a festive celebration at the end of the year with no expectations.

I was early to the party. As part of the planning committee I needed to help check on last-minute details and serve as a point of contact at the club. I watched guests arrive from a vantage point at the far end of an elegant banquet hall that was, well, decked with boughs of holly. I had a drink in my hand, a smile on my face and a top-of-the-world attitude that was sure to get me in trouble by the end of the evening.

And then she walked in.

😎

To read the rest of this story and seventy others inspired by a town in Illinois, please consider buying Park Ridge Memories on Amazon. Click on the image below.


 


Or, if you like fiction and you're in the mood for over 50 short stories, please consider buying "Natural Selections," at Amazon.com.



Wednesday, November 20, 2019

One Hundred

I am a slow reader. As a writer, I relish the flavor of well-constructed sentences, intelligent metaphors and artful descriptions of characters and settings. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then show me the words that comprise that image and I will slowly devour them, study them, enjoy them. I frequently read sentences multiple times.
I also subvocalize. This is the process of hearing words in your head as you translate them from inkblots on a page into words with meaning. I believe the key to speed reading is to learn not to slow your intake to the speed at which those words are spoken, but rather to capture their meaning as a collection of letters represented as an image, like a frame in a motion picture. In theory one can then rapidly scan over a sentence and a page in very little time. I’ve tried this and failed. And I challenge anyone else to attempt it.
So, if you likely subvocalize, not only are you hearing my words right now as if I spoke them to you, but as Charles Dickens famously took his immortal place next to Scrooge and future readers, observing along with them the appearance of an unearthly spirit, “I am standing in the spirit at your elbow.”
So here we are.
Again, I am a slow reader. Prior to retirement I had little time available for reading. It seemed that something more necessary or easily digestible always got in the way of sitting down with a good book. But now, as Mr. Philby commented about George, inventor of the Time Machine as depicted by H.G. Wells, “I have all the time in the world.”
I have been searching through lists of the one hundred greatest books ever written. My goal is to read them, along with some lesser distractions I’ve come across, whether recommended by friends or gifted by family. There is a great deal of overlap in the “best of” lists. The first narrowing of my parameters was to focus on novels. A step further might be to choose from only American authors, but I’m not ready to limit myself in that way just yet.
This year I have slogged my way through Middlemarch by George Eliot, Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, and most recently One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The latter caught my attention many years ago when I was in a similar literary mood. After college I found that I craved intellectual exercise come September each year. Perhaps it was the changing weather, fireside relaxation with a cozy blanket and a good book, or maybe it was a programmed impulse in the wake of a lifetime of school starting up at that time each year.
The net result of having inadequate time to dedicate to a given tome was a gap between reading sessions that had the effect of erasing what I’d read several days or a week earlier. In the case of “Solitude” it left me starting over, trying to memorize the relationships within six generations of a South American family whose male members were all either named Jose Arcadio or Aureliano. In one reproductive conflagration by a wandering military man, a trail of 17 Aurelianos was deposited across a war torn nation. I couldn’t keep track. I tried several times to read the book and then gave up. See the family tree on this page for a better sense of the challenge.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez won the Nobel Prize for literature in1982 "for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent's life and conflicts." He is said to have written in the style of his grandmother’s storytelling when he was a child. She would sit stone-faced and speak of fantasy and reality such that it was impossible to tell where one left off and the other began.
I wanted to read fiction that was Nobel-worthy. It left me mentally weary, satisfied with my accomplishment for having finally completed my reading of it, and enriched in my world-view and whatever notion I had of the meaning of life. From what I’ve read of experiences with LSD, it is similarly colorful and mind-expanding.
And now, on to something completely different. 

Wednesday, November 13, 2019

Uncommon Velour

Nothing humbles a young student like almost flunking out of college, particularly when told that said student is of above average IQ and is capable of much more. The conventional term for this is “underachiever.”
The student is me, it is 1972, the year in which I recklessly vote for Richard Nixon in my first general election, and I am a student at the University of Illinois. The prior year my disengaged high school counselor impatiently told me that I was good at math and science and should go into Engineering. What matters most is that I strutted into a college curriculum that thumbed its nose at my ability to coast through classes with Bs and Cs as I did in high school, investing more effort into watching reruns of Gilligan’s Island than into my studies.
On the first day of my first year in college in my very first Engineering class, the professor stood and proclaimed that, “By the end of the year only twenty-five percent of you will remain in this program.” I was shocked, almost sick to my stomach, knowing full well that he was speaking to me. Perhaps it was because I didn’t even know what classes I should take, or the meaning of their cryptic catalog codes. SYSE, CHEME, for systems engineering and chemical engineering respectively. SCREWME seemed more fitting.
I stuck with the program, managing to barely pass most classes, casually dropping a few along the way, until the day I got a frantic call from my recently widowed mother on the payphone where I hung out between classes playing cards. She had received notice that unless I maintained the status of full time student, the social security benefits she was receiving on my behalf would be dropped. By the end of my first year in Engineering I was taking only Liberal Arts courses. The writing was on the wall. I was on academic probation. Year one.
Bottoming out is a powerful motivator. With a clean slate I began my second year of college as a freshman, part two. I dropped out of Engineering and began the aimless academic wandering of a committed six-year degree pursuit, carefully avoiding physics and languages. I took the 100 level classes in everything else, from music to psychology, geology to anthropology. I really hit my stride in the latter, rocketing through the course catalog to the graduate level in short order. One very dedicated life-long Anthropology professor looked down his pointy nose at the class roster, then up at me over the bridge of his glasses and commented, “Oh, YOU’RE the freshman!” It wasn’t said in admiration. He was offended that I was there. He proceeded to make it the hardest class I’d ever taken on the path to a degree that has no value.
I was now on the Dean’s list, to my mother’s delight. After she passed away I found the letter of congratulations neatly filed away in a manila folder next to news articles about the military draft for the Vietnam War. I was the source of both her terror and her joy. Now that I’m a parent, I get it.
But the nagging question remained. If I was now “achieving” at expected levels, what was the IQ it was all based upon? Just a matter of curiosity, but it seemed as if the subject had become trendy and newsworthy, so I contacted my high school, since they were the source of the comment, and undoubtedly the magic number.
            “Oh, we don’t keep those records,” I was told.
This was all very pre-computer-age of them. In a school with a student population of 3600, perhaps storage of paper was a legitimate concern. But it had the feeling of, “You’re dead to us.”
That day I decided to take a supervised test offered by Mensa, the “club” for people with high IQs.
The exam was not easy.
😎

To read the rest of this story and seventy others inspired by a town in Illinois, please consider buying Park Ridge Memories on Amazon. Click on the image below.


 


Or, if you like fiction and you're in the mood for over 50 short stories, please consider buying "Natural Selections," at Amazon.com.

Wednesday, October 30, 2019

Red River


There was no mistaking the full onset of autumn. Dog walks now required a light jacket in the early morning. Cottonwoods were the first to drop crunchy leaves as the angle of the sun declined and days shortened. Maples gradually followed, and then oaks obliged. Menus began to feature pumpkin spice in all the usual recipes, and some that made little sense at all. Pools closed after one last hurrah over Labor Day weekend, which proved too cool this year to attract many swimmers. But the finality of it, and thoughts of the inevitable heat wave that would benefit from a cooling dip in early October demoralized the kids as they trudged off to school. For goodness sakes, Christmas decorations were on display at the local big box stores. It would soon be time to worry about the first frost and the possibility of snow.
Abby grabbed the girls’ hands and escorted them to the side of the road. She had been avoiding small messes all weekend, beginning with a fall festival on Saturday, a sticky wonder highlighted by candy apples and pumpkin carving, accompanied by cheap paper napkins that shredded and balled up long before they provided their needed value. The cool and cloudy day had threatened rain but remained dry through the afternoon. It was a blessing that avoided a muddy mess along the trails of the nature preserve, where s’mores were being prepared and vats of boiling cider steamed. Acrid wood smoke fires infused the air deliciously, and nature’s sweet essence permeated the resulting fog. Wet wipes from Abby’s purse bridged the gap between failed napkins and a thorough face washing back at the house.

To read the rest of this story and more than fifty others, please consider buying "Natural Selections," at Amazon.com.



Sunday, October 27, 2019

Good Timin'

Current drivers of Chicago expressways may find it hard to imagine a time when “rush hour” happened only in the morning and late afternoon. With a little planning, you could avoid the bumper-to-bumper delays that now make driving a time-consuming ordeal. Factor in the modern scourge of distracted drivers, texting and fiddling with all sorts of electronics, and road rage that seems to erupt with greater frequency and less provocation, and much of the fun has been ruined.
Going for a drive used to be an inexpensive, low-stress way to spend a few hours during the summer. I cannot adequately convey how many fewer cars were on the roads in the 1970s. On the weekends the expressways were lightly traveled unless something major was taking place on the lakefront or somewhere downtown.
A recent evening reminded me of the enjoyable August weather in Chicago, those rare days that conspire to get everything right; low humidity, temperature near 82 degrees, clear, unpolluted skies, and a complete absence of frontal systems or rain. Perhaps there was a festival in Grant Park or at Navy Pier. ChicagoFest and Taste of Chicago come to mind. By 1979 all of my friends had graduated from college and left me pursuing the six-year plan on my own.
To console myself I bought a little yellow car that I would spend time waxing, sometimes in the parking lot near a small local lake. By late afternoon, as the sun dropped just above treetop height, illuminating my back as I headed downtown, my shiny vehicle literally lit up the overhead reflective green directional signs on the Kennedy Expressway as I passed underneath. My T-tops were stowed behind my seat, windows up against the lateral rushing wind, but open to the rolling white clouds and blue sky above, gently refreshing the cabin air without the chill of conditioning. It was liberating, exhilarating, relaxing. It was freedom.
Recall that it was the late 70s when I mention that I would slide an 8-track tape into the dash with a satisfying kerchunk. It was one of the last of its kind, but not quite as obsolete as it might seem. At home, I had a deck on which I could record my own specific mixes. In this case, a tape that just said, “Drive.”
The first random track that plays is perfect as I accelerate up the on-ramp, full volume, guitar and bass bleeding in front of a pulse-altering drum beat:
            In the day we sweat it out on the streets of a runaway American dream
            At night we ride through the mansions of glory in suicide machines
😎

To read the rest of this story and seventy others inspired by a town in Illinois, please consider buying Park Ridge Memories on Amazon. Click on the image below.


 


Or, if you like fiction and you're in the mood for over 50 short stories, please consider buying "Natural Selections," at Amazon.com.

Wednesday, October 2, 2019

For Men Only! The Secret Society.

I’ve never been much of a joiner. I didn’t join a frat in college. I wasn’t on a team in high school, and didn’t stay late for “extra-curricular activities” – they just sounded…extra.
But as an adult, I felt a nagging desire to become a member of an organization, a fraternal brotherhood of some kind. The search began in my twenties, but this episode is about my most recent attempt, the first in my retirement years.
At this point, I’m reminded of a quote from the late Groucho Marx. As it is told, he attended a Friar’s Club meeting in Los Angeles in the 1940s. One meeting was enough for him to realize it wasn’t right for him. He didn’t enjoy it, so he submitted a letter of resignation. A follow-up from the group’s president requested a reason for his departure. Marx famously replied, “I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members.”
Several of my attempts at memberhood (if that’s a word) resulted in feelings similar to those experienced by Groucho. The most recent was last year when I contacted a well-known and somewhat mysterious group known as the Freemasons. I never got to the point at which I could reveal their secret handshake or other well-guarded secrets, so I feel safe in knowing that I will not be hunted down by a posse of black-cloaked Illuminati and ritually disposed of for betraying a centuries-old confidence. And I was told that they actually aren’t a secret society, but that they do have secrets.
A friend of mine belongs to the Masons in Illinois, and I reached out to him for guidance when it came time to locate a Lodge and work toward admission. He’s a really interesting guy, and I thought it might help to know someone. It didn’t in my case, but over the course of three meetings, I witnessed several other newbies who seemed to be fast-tracked by benefit of a family history in the organization. The Masons wisely kept me at arm's length. They smelled treachery.
😎

To read the rest of this story and seventy others inspired by a town in Illinois, please consider buying Park Ridge Memories on Amazon. Click on the image below.


 


Or, if you like fiction and you're in the mood for over 50 short stories, please consider buying "Natural Selections," at Amazon.com.

Thursday, September 19, 2019

Children of the Corn

We visited our first-ever corn maze over the weekend. It’s a very autumnal right of passage, along with pumpkin patches, steaming cider, bushels of exotic apples, cinnamon sticks, pumpkin doughnuts, fudge, caramels and those painted plywood caricatures with holes where the faces should be. Throw in a few farm animals and you have a fun family outing. All of this signals the onset of darker, cooler times, the cozy blanket of fall and the approach of seasonal dormancy, both human and vegetable.
At this time of year corn is no longer knee-high-by-the-Fourth-of-July. Not even close. It rises overhead, eight feet or so in height, dense as a bamboo room divider with leaves, tassels and cobs woven throughout the towering stalks in shades of green, yellow and brown so thick as to prevent views of adjacent rows. It is nature’s drywall. For the record, we visited Tanner’s Orchard in Speer, Illinois, about thirty minutes north of Peoria.
I don’t know how they grow or trim corn mazes into the complex shapes that form pictures when viewed from above. I suspect tractors use GPS guidance to get this done. The maze we entered was sculpted to form Albert Einstein’s portrait, wild white hair and all. But from ground level when we entered at the point where his shirt collar meets his sweater, we simply faced a green wall of impenetrable plants. We had the choice to go left via three avenues into a winding grid cumulatively over two miles long, or right into another that was perhaps half that distance.

Well, this is easy, we thought. We took the leftmost corridor and got lost within two minutes.
Fortunately the four of us remained together. Splitting up would have lengthened our stay, or forced us to start communicating with each other by cell-phone. The journey was startlingly confusing, twists and turns disorienting the traveler despite a brilliant overhead sun that should have provided a clue as to compass headings. Also overhead, a windmill slowly rotated in the distance. That was a fixed marker in closer proximity. But wait, as I turned to get my bearings, several other windmills appeared, scattering the compass points I had placed on my mental map.
The feeling of being surrounded by corn is not unlike being in an extremely dense forest. But a forest canopy rises overhead, whereas corn is consistently obscuring all the way to ground level. Kalampokiphobia is the fear of corn. Autophobia is the fear of being alone. Cleithrophobia is the fear of being trapped. Corn mazes trigger an unexpected soup of all three. The accompanying anxiety is not unlike claustrophobia, but with the vast blue sky overhead and rows opening before and behind you, less immediately crushing and harder to explain.
Comparing the small printed map we were given with the compass app on my phone was no help. I launched the program “MapMyWalk,” thinking it would scrawl a red tracing identical to the image of Einstein’s face. Had I started the app before entering the maze it may have proved useful. Instead, it just rendered a childish fingerpainting of a random, wandering set of adults.
At one point I consulted my weather app to find out when the sun would set. The thought of being lost in the corn after dark made my heart skip a beat. That’s when all the really scary stuff happens, as in the 2010 movie The Maze and I’m sure dozens of other horror films. Children of the Corn came to mind, and I don’t even remember that story. Would they come looking for us? Did they even keep a record of who entered and exited?
After about 45 minutes, we stumbled out of Einstein’s ear and into the adjacent field, a bit sweaty and definitely having had enough.
Dear Bucket List: please enter “Corn Maze” as a line item and immediately check it off. Thank you.

Tuesday, September 17, 2019

How Dry I Am

In the frosty North I suffered during long winters from skin on my legs and arms so dry it itched and flaked despite my best efforts to moisturize. Nosebleeds were common and usually poorly timed – as I was walking out the door, late for an appointment. Lips chapped and cracked, even after applying candlewax-like amounts of Chapstick, and my scalp shed snow in direct proportion to that falling outside.
And then summer provided temporary relief.
Here in Florida there is a different hydrating challenge. There is an intense heat and humidity during southern summers that ratchets up your body’s natural cooling system to little effect. You sweat profusely. A short walk with the dog leaves you glistening within about ten minutes, and suffering from “swamp ass” (yeah, gross but it happens) after twenty.
I’ve heard it said that if you want to better understand how it feels down here, take a long hot shower, then put on your clothes without drying yourself off. Multiple daily clothing changes are routine no matter how little you wear. Long pants or sleeves feel like the chemical hot packs you might carry to football games in a Green Bay winter.
Extended time outside requires sunscreen of course. The sun feels like molten copper, blanketing your head and shoulders with the broiling intensity of a Weber grill. And you’re the meat. But the other danger is rapid dehydration.
Our bodies are made up of approximately 60 percent water. Losing ten percent of that amount results in physical and mental deterioration. So you can survive fluid loss via perspiration much longer than the equivalent rate of blood loss.
A good sweat is something for which we enter a sauna or steam room. It’s therapeutic and invigorating when the duration is controllable and optional. But venture outside during August in Florida to do some yard work as I did recently, and it quickly becomes clear that your body’s attempt to cool you requires lower ambient humidity and a nice breeze. The amount of sweat developing on your forehead isn’t readily apparent until you touch it with a swipe of a finger. It then coalesces like the condensation on a cold bottle of beer, cascading and rolling in a gathering wave, surfing toward your eyebrows and spilling onto both sides of your eyeglasses.
Dehydration sneaks up on you, leaves you feeling depleted for the rest of the day, and can cause leg cramps overnight. How do you know you’re headed for a literal melt down? The obvious clue is your t-shirt. There aren’t just embarrassing little patches of darkness under your arms, around your neck and down your chest and back. Your shirt has changed color. Whatever it was before, the entire thing is a dark shade of that color now.
A bit later your hands begin to shrivel. They look like you’ve been soaking in a hot tub for an hour, all prune-like and resembling your ancient aunt Edna’s fingers, through no fault of her own, on a normal day. Pinch the skin on your arm between thumb and forefinger and you’ll notice that it molds like PlayDoh, not bouncing back to its original shape. And eventually, if you lean over to pick a weed, when you stand up, the world begins to spin. The dizziness is a result of low blood pressure. You probably didn’t notice, but your body quit producing urine more than an hour ago. Now you’re headed for heat stroke, and for that there is one treatment: go inside and drink water.
Carrying a large water bottle postpones the above effects, but even several bottles into this experience I’ve found that I have limits, and have staggered into the house in surrender more than once. Along with water, you’re shedding electrolytes that help your tiny sub-cellular mechanisms continue operating. You need to replenish those too. The makers of Gatorade profess that their product helps with this, but studies don’t support the claim. I’ve even heard that football players drink pickle juice, but I have no idea if that’s true.
During a recent visit, my son regularly went for one-hour runs. Even if I could run, I wouldn’t do that. He came through the house, leaving a mop-worthy trail of sweat behind him and then jumped directly into the pool, appearing somewhat frantic. My Haitian neighbor once asked me why I was working outside in the middle of the day. I had no good answer. Lack of experience?
So, why would anyone live in a Godforsaken Hellscape like this? The answer requires a certain amount of gloating about our endless summer, the more pleasant version between November and May, that we get to enjoy when northerners are staying hydrated by taking out the garbage, causing the water in their veins to form ice crystals that time-release moisture back into their organs. This assumes that they haven’t fallen on the ice and broken a hip or had a heart attack shoveling wet snow. Their skin is another story.
You might consider becoming a “Snowbird” if you have the means, enjoy paying two of every bill, and feel like starting up, shutting down and worrying about two properties. It is estimated that 80 percent of residents along the Southwest Gulf of Florida are transitory. But if you stay all year you get to enjoy lighter traffic, available seats in restaurants, and a perpetual thirst that had best be taken seriously. Pickle juice, anyone?

Friday, September 6, 2019

Time Flies

It was almost four years before I retired when I downloaded a countdown app and entered a date on my iPhone. The number was around 1400 days. Sometimes I would check the app daily. Other times a week would go by before taking a look. But the number dwindled at a painfully slow rate. It seemed as if it would be forever before I left my desk for the last time, looking down the hallway I’d traversed for 27 years. I imagined there would be tears in my eyes, the same ones that caused my eyes to brim with moisture when my first child got on the bus for kindergarten. Wait, absolutely not. Nothing like that! I would head off with the closest approximation of skipping that my petrifying body could muster and never look back. I would become young again, live an active lifestyle, lose weight and do all those things I’ve been putting off for lack of time.
1399
1398
1397
Well, imagine my surprise when I recently discovered that the app is still running on my phone. At some point I reset the text it displays to reflect the date we moved to Florida, our retirement destination. And here it is:


I did not fear retirement, I longed for it. But even while ticking off days to that eventual goal, I had a nagging feeling that I was also counting down the days of my life. What if I didn’t make it? What if something horrible, counting down on some unanticipated app loomed menacingly between now and then? What if my wife developed an aneurysm and needed brain surgery at day 1030 (she did, and she’s fine). And ultimately, whatever the days would bring, they were days that I only got to live once. And here I am with 2237 days less than I had way back when I started counting (1400 plus 837).
We all have a timer relentlessly ticking off the days we have left on Earth. It’s best to make the most of them. Live each day without regard for the number of days until Christmas, the end of school or a nice vacation. There’s no guarantee that waking up today is repeatable tomorrow. Counting them is just, well, a waste of time.

Monday, June 3, 2019

Fear of the Known


More than 15,000 home fires are started by dryer fires every year, usually from lint build-up, but few people are aware of this danger in their homes. Tornadoes and black ice are another issue altogether.




“Get to the basement!” 
Kurt captained his family to safety, wedging them in the southwest basement corner under blankets and an upended mattress. The concrete walls did little to alleviate the imagined horror of the roof being torn away, the house’s undifferentiated contents being sucked skyward, furniture and human shrapnel littering the landscape.
Out of the southwest sky snaked five black vortices, tearing homes from foundations in a sinister hula as they lunged closer to the fragile house.
“Momma,” sobbed Lisa “where’s Buddy?” The beloved family Dachshund had been forgotten in the rush to a safe place.
Kurt looked at Mary, then down at the kids, and again at Mary.
😎

To read the rest of this story and seventy others inspired by a town in Illinois, please consider buying Park Ridge Memories on Amazon. Click on the image below.


 


Or, if you like fiction and you're in the mood for over 50 short stories, please consider buying "Natural Selections," at Amazon.com.



Sunday, March 3, 2019

The Other Side of the Tracks

I was born and raised in Park Ridge, with little understanding of just how lucky I was to live there. My first ride in a car was as an infant, to my home at 1313 Vine Avenue. I was a south-sider for a few years, living near Norridge on the south and Edison Park to the east. We relocated to 925 Goodwin Drive several years later, a humble brick ranch on a beautiful Elm-lined street in the city's northwest corner.
We lived in Park Ridge in part due to my father’s need to access to the Chicago & Northwestern train line for his job in downtown Chicago. My parents never had more than one used car but the Dee Road station was quite walkable. When the train was on time, Dad returned from work each evening, stepping through our unlocked side screen door at 5:57 pm. It was a routine that even our dog came to rely on.
Our unremarkable life in an unremarkable 1100 square foot house continued without incident until a series of sad events took my parents from me by age 21. I continued to live in the house with my grandmother and added a second floor where I could be “on my own” when all of my friends went away to school. I also added a rather large swimming pool in the backyard that to this day I occasionally visit from space. The Google image hasn’t been updated in years, but that’s ok. I had good times and quite a few parties there. Perhaps you attended.
My Pool From Space
Time passed in Park Ridge. College, work, marriage, children. My wife, infant son and I left our idyllic bubble in 1990 and moved further north for our next phase, closing a geographic chapter that for me spanned 36 years. It seemed our children were not destined to attend Madison School (already a Park District office by that time), Lincoln Junior High, or Maine South. I sobbed the day we moved, in an emotional outburst that took me entirely by surprise. I grieved the loss of that formative space and will always consider it home.
Fifteen miles to the north we settled into a new bubble called Lincolnshire, and my daughter was born in Lake Forest Hospital. We upped her pedigree considerably with our move and her birth on the North Shore. And of course, I don’t believe that, but now I’ve got your attention, and that’s what this story is all about.
You see when I got married to the child of a police officer, I was introduced to the charming enclave known as Edison Park. If you’re not aware, Chicago police and firemen were required to live within city limits. Edison Park is as far as you can get to the north without crossing the boundary into legitimate suburbia where our Park Ridge lifestyle had taken us. And it was then that I was made aware that a daughter of Edison Park had married someone with a label.
I was a "Park Ridgie."
Yes, my mother-in-law assigned me this endearing term and made me painfully aware that the train tracks that ran parallel to Main Street and Sharringhausen’s pharmacy in fact crossed invisibly and perpendicularly over Northwest Highway between Touhy and Devon on Ozanam Avenue, just blocks short of her Oriole address. I was from the other side of the tracks! Or was she?
😎

To read the rest of this story and seventy others inspired by a town in Illinois, please consider buying Park Ridge Memories on Amazon. Click on the image below.


 


Or, if you like fiction and you're in the mood for over 50 short stories, please consider buying "Natural Selections," at Amazon.com.