What is it ???

Nasturtiums

One week into summer and our backyard is looking great. Lots of flowers, lots of green things bursting out of the dirt. Mark had me plant his dahlias across the back of the house and then he had me sprinkle some flower seeds in between those dahlias. The seed package said, "Mixed Wild Flowers." Okay, it was mixed alright, but as of right now I call them weeds. Not one flower has come of that seed package, just green things growing and they look suspiciously like the weeds in my neighbor's yard. We do have a lot of roses, an unbelievable amount of grapes, raspberries, and my nasturtiums. The nasturtiums look real nice along the fence. So far the dogs don't have any of their favorite tomatoes. The little yellow ones that they like best have not got past the flowering stage and the dogs are getting impatient. The last two days I've had to yell at Chandler for finding his way into the human garden. Those tomatoes are for me. The dog tomatoes have their own area. One thing that is growing out there, I did not plant. It just popped up on its own and I have no idea what the hell it is. It has gigantic leaves and seems to just love where it is. If it's a weed, it is a weed that I like. Mark wants me to yank it out, but I really do like it. So if anybody knows what the hell this thing is, let me know. Here's the photo.

35 Pound dog added for size comparison.

The Great Wide Open Spaces

View of the parking garage from Mark's doctor's office

I took Mark downtown for a doctor's appointment yesterday. His appointment was for 10:40 in the morning. At 9:20 Mark started screaming from the living room, "Are you ready to go?" No, I was not ready to leave for downtown, a twenty minute ride from our house. So after a few minutes of back and forth (also called arguing) we went out to the car and left for the doctor's office. Twenty minutes later we arrived.

"Lots of time before your appointment, Mark."

"Drive around the block and see if you can find a free parking spot."

So I obliged Mark and made my way around the block. Driving around the block in Downtown Chicago involved four left turns, each one blocked by a never ending parade of pedestrians. Ten minutes later it was determined that there were no free spaces.

"Go ahead and park in the garage. I'll pay."

Magic words, so I did a quick right turn into the hospital parking garage where I was greeted by a sign that told me, "Parking $23". But Mark was paying.

The Northwestern Hospital parking garage is like many that I have been in. It is a serpentine series of ramps with diagonal parking on either side. You just keep going on up until you find an open space. Easy enough... for me. Not for the giant assholes that were in front of us. Giant, smelly, ignorant, assholes. Here is a tip for the morons who have never encountered a parking garage before, do not sit and wait for that person you saw get in their car to leave. Because while you sit there in your entitled glory, fifty cars have backed up behind you. Up ahead there are plenty of empty parking spaces, but the idiots can't figure that out. I could even see empty spaces over on the down ramp, if only the assholes would get the hell out of my way. So it took me over twenty minutes inching up that ramp to get to a parking space, right next to the elevator I might add. And as Mark and I made our way up to the eighteenth floor to see his doctor, Mark looked at his watch and said, "Whew, we just made it on time."

Alan's Big Fluffy Pride Parade

Well, once again I missed the Pride Parade. It used to be that I never missed it. I saw my first Gay Pride Parade in 1973 as a participant. I drove the lead vehicle with the parade organizers sitting on the truck I borrowed from my boss. I hadn't told Hy Sachs that his truck was going to be in the Gay  Pride Parade, so I was a little worried that a television crew was taking video of us. I needn't have worried. The television stations gave all of twenty seconds coverage and only spotlighted the most bizarre entries. I was in a few other gay pride parades back then because it was part parade, part civil rights march. By 1981 it was almost all parade and once again I was a participant, as a cheer leader. It was a lot of fun. 

Over the years I have attended the San Francisco, Pride Parade (Not sure when they dropped the 'gay' part), the New York City, Pride Parade, and the Wilton Manors, Florida, Pride Parade. All very enjoyable and inspiring. So why haven't I attended the Pride Parade here in Chicago for the last three years? Fucked up feet is why. I know that it requires a lot of walking to see one of these parades, and once you get there you will end up standing for hours. I just can't do it anymore. I have serious foot problems. But I did come up with a plan for next year while talking to my sister Lisa. I will try to get a float entered into the parade. I can load it up with all my gay relatives (I have quite a few.), put a big fluffy chair right in the center of the float for me to sit in, and then hire hot young dancers to jiggle around on the float while I enjoy the parade.

Rain

The rain and heat we've had over the last week reminds me of living in Florida. June is the rainiest month in South Florida. Almost every day there are thunder storms with fierce lightning and tropical downpours, like nothing you would ever see up here in Chicago. So I was happy to see the heat and humidity break back to more typical Chicago temperatures on Tuesday. However, we are getting some pretty good rains. Not Florida quality rain, but still good rain. It has unleashed the garden. The cucumber plant has doubled in size in just two days and is threatening to nudge out the tomato plant next to it. I thought four feet would be enough buffer, but despite the tomato plant also growing at a fantastic rate, the cucumber will probably try to choke it off. I've tried steering the tendrils of the cuke away from its neighbors, but every time it rains, it grows another two feet.

My favorite thing is when it rains at night. A burst of lightning, the thud of thunder, and I drift right off to sleep. Seriously, thunder storms do not keep me awake. Just the opposite, they put me to sleep. Wednesday night I slept straight through from midnight to seven in the morning. A very unusual occurrence. Not even a call from my bladder woke me up. I awoke on Thursday morning with saliva drooling from the corner of my mouth, and an extreme urge to run to the bathroom. It's been a long time since I slept that good. Trouble is it continued raining all morning and into the afternoon causing me to keep dozing off. I fell asleep in my big fluffy chair, on my bed, and while playing rummy on the computer. Yes, I can fall asleep while playing card games on the computer......  zzzzzz

Father's Day, 2018

It may be a station wagon, but it was fast.

All you really have left when somebody leaves this Earth are memories. You can have things and photos left by that person, but what those really are, are triggers for your memories of them. My dad died eighteen years ago and on this Father's Day all I have left are bits and pieces of my time with him. Probably the furthest back I can remember is Dad smashing down the wall in our bedroom to create a dining room. He had finally finished the two attic bedrooms, one for the boys and one for his only daughter, and now he would turn our old bedroom into the dining room. It was exciting to see him smash that wall down with a sledgehammer. Lots of dust. I also remember riding in Dad's Packard. A large pre-war car with running boards that we would sit on outside the Dairy Palace, while slurping down our ice cream cones. A semi-truck ran over that car. It was parked, nobody hurt. There was the time that dad sat on a bag of nails. I vividly remember him bent over in the bathroom while Mom extracted each nail from his butt cheeks, and dabbed a dot of mercurochrome and each wound. Almost every summer Dad would take us on vacation in a car loaded with kids, suitcases, and vacation crap. One year he took us to Saint Louis, where he was born, to see his aunt and some other family members. I remember clearly that they were the last white people in a neighborhood that had turned all black. Mostly I remember that our relatives all lived in old houses and that it was hotter than Satan's spit.

Baseball figures large in my memories of Dad. He listened to the White Sox on the radio and watched them when they were on television while enjoying a glass of Blatz Beer. He also took us to see White Sox games, once parking about a mile away in the Bridgeport neighborhood. I watched him give a couple of hard looking city kids, fifty cents each to watch the car. I did not like that because all I got for my allowance was a nickel per week. Of course I now realize he paid them not to trash his car. On a hot Father's Day in the 1980s I turned the tables on Dad and took him to see a Chicago Cubs game. It turned out to be too hot for him, so we walked back to my apartment and sat in the air conditioning, drinking beer, and eating hot dogs while watching the last four innings on television. Much better than the nose bleed seats I had bought at Wrigley Field. All good memories. I do have one bad baseball memory with Dad. That's when he "talked" me into joining Little League. I was horrible at it and did not want to play in Little League. The last time Dad saw me play baseball, after striking out three times, he told me that if I didn't do better they would put me in the instructional league. He was correct, that is what happened and I hated that even more.

Other good memories. Dad letting me buy a car before I even had a drivers license. It wouldn't go faster than forty miles per hour, but I loved that old Studebaker. Later, Dad gave me the keys to his brand new 1967 Ford with the 390ci engine. Sure it was a station wagon, but that day I found out it could go way faster than the 120mph on the speedometer. Probably my very best memory was in his last couple of years with us. I introduced him to Mark at a family get together at my sister Sue's house. While I was in the bathroom, Dad took Mark around and introduced him as, "Alan's new, special friend."