You'll Shoot Your Eye Out Kid

Looks like we're in the last days of short pants wearing season. Even if it drops to sixty degrees I still wear my shorts, but if it gets much colder I give in. It's just that it is so much easier when you have to go to the bathroom. Just drop and plop. Seriously, I like the freedom I feel in shorts without being all bound up in long pants. So I have a rotation of shorts that I wear all summer long. Only five pair of shorts that I wear and launder in order. Recently, however, one of my shorts blew out the zipper beyond repair. That kind of screwed me up and left me with only four pair to put in rotation. But I made do because I could see the end of summer coming on fast. And then I popped a button off another pair of shorts, leaving me with only three pair. This time it caused a complete breakdown of my laundry/shorts wearing schedule. So I had to take it over to the little tailor shop around the corner and have the button replaced. I know, why don't I do that myself? Because there is a little Eastern European lady around the corner that does it for only two dollars, that's why. Cheap price for sure, but the only thing is there is another price I had to pay. My self respect. I walked in and handed my shorts over to the husband and explained that I needed the button sewed back on. He looked at the shorts, then looked at me, and then looked at my belly.

"You're getting too fat. The shorts will be ready tomorrow."

The Hole

Some months ago a small hole opened up in the street out front. Not unusual. Up until now our street had been one of the smoothest in Chicago. Everybody on neighboring streets always bitch and complain about how bad their street is, like the one immediately to our east. Not only is that street horribly rough to drive down but the city added speed bumps. Improperly constructed speed bumps that rattle your bones no matter how slow you go over them. We have no speed bumps on our street, just smooth virgin pavement. Until that hole showed up. About two months ago the small hole caved in creating a much larger hole. It is now three feet wide and just as deep. If you look down into the hole you can see that it extends beyond the opening at the surface and spreads out under the pavement, leaving no support for the blacktop above. Naturally I called the city, twice. A police car showed up after each call. The cops got out of their car, stood there looking at the hole for a minute, and then drove away. I figured they would report back that yes, there was a dangerous hole in the middle of Fairfield Avenue and it would be fixed. It hasn't been fixed. A highway barricade was placed over it so nobody would drive into the hole. That barricade has been run over every day since it was placed there and the hole has got bigger. At this point everybody who lives on our street is aware of the hole and gingerly squeezes past the hole and the parked cars. It was even more difficult today because some idiot parked too far from the curb leaving barely enough room to get by. If the city doesn't fix that soon, it will be winter when the streets all start birthing holes of their own. At that point it will not be called a hole anymore, but instead be called a common pothole. Or a speed hole, to slow down the speeders.

Dad's Sexy Secretary

In the dining room of our house on Ravinia Drive in Tinley Park, was my dad's secretary. No, not some woman who my dad was having an affair with. It was a sort of desk. A tall upright piece of furniture with glass doors enclosing a couple of shelves, a drop down writing surface with little cubbyholes behind that, and drawers below for storing all my dad's important shit. I'm not sure when it showed up in our house. As far as I know it was always there and when we moved, it moved with us. Each and every one of Dad's children spent time at that desk exploring the world of Dad. In that desk was Dad's pipe that he never smoked, Dad's stapler, paper clips, stamps, bills to be paid, his Zippo lighter from World War II, and pens. One pen in particular drew a lot of interest every time we would poke around in there. At one end of the pen was a girl, maybe a hula girl. She was floating in liquid and when you turned the pen upside down, her clothes came off.

Dad left this Earth, for almost twenty years now, and Mom has grown old without him. This past week Mom moved into her new apartment in a fancy ass, old peoples facility. Seriously, it is nice there. Two restaurants on the premises, a movie room, a library that looks like a men's club, and on demand attendants if you run into a 'situation' in your apartment. I didn't realize Mom could just press a button on her wrist and the attendant would come to help her. I would have told her to use it last Saturday when I was visiting. While I was there, Mom had a situation in the bathroom. I heard her call for me to get her a fresh pair of underpants. As I stood outside the bathroom door holding the underwear in my outstretched hand, she told me to bring it in to her. I was mortified. No young man (I'm twenty eight years younger than Mom.) should have to see his mom buck naked on the toilet. That vision is now burned into my memory. But I have wandered off my story here. You see, now that Mom has moved out of her house, much of her furniture won't fit in her new apartment. So I asked for Dad's secretary, and now it sits in my dining room just like when I was a little boy. I intend to move it into my office where I will use it daily. And when I drop that writing surface down, it will be just like I was five years old again playing with that pen.

I Was Told Not to Call it 'The Home'.

Kick the Can

It's been a difficult week. I had a horrible night bowling on Tuesday. That was bad. Oh, and  Mark had a flare up of his breathing problems. For the last few weeks he has been getting progressively worse, not eating and what he could get down, puking back up. He hates going to the hospital, so I kept waiting until we saw his doctor on Monday. Doctor said, "Get him to the hospital." So, Mark ended up in the intensive care unit. They're having a hell of a time figuring out what his problem is beyond the breathing, but they did send him home yesterday and he is much better than before. He's now eating and not puking. That was a pretty nice turn around for him. Usually the hospital returns him to me worse off than when he went in. So there was that.

Today Mom is moving. She has been asked to give up her three bedroom, two bathroom home for a small apartment in an assisted living community. She's 97 years old and only uses a small portion of that house. In the morning she gets up out of bed, moves seven feet over to her bathroom, then gets on her Hoveround cart and goes out to the television room where she sits and watches television all day. So she only uses a tiny fraction of that house, which is why we got her an apartment where she can do all that stuff and have a nurse right outside her door, just in case. I was out there for my weekly visit yesterday, the last in her old house. She and I have been pretending that nothing is out of the ordinary. We haven't talked at all about her moving, so when my older brother showed up and blurted out that he was there to help her move, I had a silent conniption fit. Mom pretends she doesn't know what's going on, but after my brother said that she decided to start roaming the house on her cart.

"Isn't it nice that I have all this room? I have such a nice big house."

I smiled and nodded.

"Those four pictures on that wall over there are perfect. It's such a big wall."
She then spun the Hoveround a hundred and eighty degrees. 
"I love this window here in the living room. You know I sit here looking out the window quite often."

She doesn't, unless somebody moved the television out to the front yard. Suddenly Mom saw a need to use every square foot of that house, to show me how much she needs it.

I won't be there today when Mom moves to her new digs. That's why my older brother flew up from Florida, to help my sister do the deed. I asked Dave, "What if she refuses to leave and go to the 'home'? Dave assured me that, "She'll go." I know I should be there to help, and I feel a tad guilty letting it all rest upon my siblings, but I have Mark to take care of. Sometimes he is just so handy to have around.

The Waterboy

When I was a kid, water was water. Unless the water was in the local creek. That was where our toilets flushed into in the 1950s. So, as long as you avoided drinking creek water, you were okay. Water right out of the kitchen sink tap, okay. Water from the basement laundry tub faucet, okay. Water from the garden hose outside, that was okay but it often tasted like the rubber hose it was running out of. When we lived in Florida, the city water delivered to our house from the water main out front had a yellow tint to it. For the first few months I lived in Florida I thought my roommate wasn't flushing the toilet. Then I was informed that the color of the Fort Lauderdale city water was naturally yellow. I drank it anyway.

In the summer of 1997 Mark moved in with me, bringing along some of his customs and habits. Mark did not drink water directly out of the tap. Mark insisted that we only drink bottled water. So I had to start schlepping home heavy cases of bottled water. In an effort to avoid a hernia, I installed a water filter on the kitchen sink. Not good enough. Mark still wanted bottled water. So I then got one of those office type water coolers for the house. Now I didn't have to schlep cases of water home from the supermarket. No, now it was hefting huge jugs of water that I bought at the Home Depot. My next move was a bit deceptive. I started refilling the giant water cooler jugs with water from the kitchen sink. Of course this was never done when Mark was around.

Three years ago we moved to Chicago. I did not bring the water cooler with us. So once again I have been required to haul cases of water home from the store. Ecologically unsound, little plastic water bottles wrapped in plastic. I pointed out to Mark that we had a gigantic water source just a couple of miles from our house, and the city delivers it right to the kitchen sink for a nominal sum. That did not convince him.

"I'm not drinking that filthy Lake Michigan water." He whined.

So once again I am bringing home store bought water. I only hope that Mark never notices, that case of store bought water seems to last forever.