Mom's Cherry Coffee Cake

 

I have managed to lose nineteen pounds in the last year. It's been slow and the big reason I lost that weight is because I've deleted ninety five percent of the sugar intake I used to gobble up. Ah, but Satan always is nearby.

After Saturday, when I had Mark's family and my family along with a few close friends over, there was some food left. My guests had voted with their stomachs and the result was clear. Cold cut and cheese wraps won out over the muffuletta sandwiches three to one. I've been eating muffuletta sandwiches twice a day for three days now. I don't know how much longer that can go on. There was other food left over, including cakes, cookies, and my mother's recipe coffee cake. The cakes and cookies that weren't eaten, were left on a tray overnight on the counter wrapped in Saran Wrap. Also on that tray was the coffee cake that my sister Peggy made. It was so good, exactly like Mom used to make it. Which is why all morning on Sunday I was slowly eating it from the tray of sweets. About ten slices of that coffee cake were left over and by early afternoon I had gone through nine of them. That's when Dennis came down from his apartment upstairs to help me eat the rest of the stuff on that tray. "Go ahead and help yourself." I told him. He lifted the Saran Wrap off of the tray.

"Thanks, but no. This stuff is covered in ants."

I reached for my glasses and put them on. Suddenly the tray of cakes and cookies came alive. It was true, ants everywhere including on the last piece of Mom's coffee cake. I had been eating ants all morning. So I took off my glasses, picked up the last piece of coffee cake, and shoved it into my mouth. No way was I going to waste that. I did throw the rest of the stuff into the trash.

 

My Muse

 

I remember when we lost my dad. My mother was devastated even though she knew it was coming. For three years every phone conversation I had with Mom on my regular Sunday phone call, ended in Mom sobbing.

It's difficult to lose somebody you've spent so much time with. Mark and I were together for twenty three and a half years. When I met him I was living like a twenty something single man. I was forty seven, but my apartment looked like it was decorated by a college rugby team... if they were all gay. I had sports memorabilia on the walls, Target and Goodwill furniture, and a big carpeted cat tree in the living room. Mark moved in and looked at it as a blank canvas. We spent months of shopping for just the right things to make my apartment, our apartment. In the end I think he did a fantastic job. You'd never know I wasn't a skilled decorator.

Mark also goaded me into traveling more. Without him I don't think I would have ended up at a bar in Paris on 'naked night'. I wouldn't have experienced watching Mark challenge a giant German woman in the aisle of a railroad car (She just wouldn't move). We visited Amsterdam twice, because Mark loved the 'coffee houses'. Sure, Mark used to get lost in every city we ever visited, but that wasn't necessarily a bad thing. In a way Mark got to see more of those cities than I did as he wandered around trying to find our hotel. Meanwhile, I got to take naps knowing full well that Mark was probably lost. I once sat in a little restaurant in Venice and watched Mark wander back and forth past the window while looking for our hotel. He did not find the humor in that.

Yes, Mark inspired many of my blog posts. In fact I started this blog because of Mark and our visit to Georgia. I just had to put it all down in writing because I didn't think anybody would believe all the stories.

I miss him. I did not think I would miss him this much. So much that at least once a day something triggers tears. Sometimes just a little teary eyed cry, sometimes a full on sobbing jag. But just like my mom, I will get on with my life and the thoughts that bring on the sadness will fade.

Aglets

 

I have a hard time buying shoes. My feet are a strange shape with a faulty structure. Bones don't quite fit right and there is nerve damage that requires just the right shoe. Knowing that, for some reason I occasionally will buy a substandard shoe. I fall for advertising that says my feet will feel great in a pair of shoes. Yet after five days of wearing the cheaper shoes, my feet rebel. Last week I bought a pair at a department store. They were on sale and I had a fifteen percent off coupon for the store. So I succumbed to the temptation. The shoes felt fine in the store. Then I started wearing them. To walk the dogs. To go shopping. Five days of the bargain shoes and my feet hated them. Not only my feet, but my knees, legs, and back started hurting.

I was sitting in the living room the other day and I noticed some little black things on the carpet. Looked like bugs, so I took a closer look while holding one of my new shoes to clobber them if they were actually bugs. They were not bugs. What I found them to be, were the aglets from the shoelaces of my new shoes. The Shoes I don't want anymore. Scout had chewed them off. Possibly she was trying to tell me something. 

 

When I was Fourteen

When I was a kid I loved putting model cars together. Since I couldn't actually drive a car, I found some satisfaction in plastic models of the cars I'd love to have. For hours I would sit in my room assembling and painting the models, usually with a brand of glue and paint called Testors. I'm talking about the old days before adults figured out that kids could get high on model airplane glue. No, I'm not saying that I intentionally got high on the glue. But as I got further into each model building session the quality of work seemed to lessen. By the time I was gluing headlights or tires on, chances are alignment would be off and gobs of dried glue oozing from joined pieces would be the result. The Testors Paint covered some of the flaws. As you can see from the vintage advertisement above, Testors was well within a young man's budget. It came to about ten cents per bottle of paint.

I read somewhere that Testors black enamel worked well for certain Ford Model A touch ups. It seemed like a good fix for things like the peeling paint on my running boards, or chips in the black paint elsewhere. It worked well when I was a kid, so I went online and ordered a bottle from Amazon. I must have been high on glue when I ordered, because I didn't notice the size of the bottle. I assumed it was one ounce. The paint arrived on Saturday. It is not a one ounce bottle of paint. It is one quarter of an ounce, and it cost $3.14. That is $12.56 per ounce, or take that a bit further, $1,607.68 per gallon. A little bit less than the price of an ounce of gold.

Not quite as big as I remember

 

More Like an Old Nag

 

I've always heard the saying, "I had to pee like a race horse." So the question is, do race horses pee faster, harder, and more than say, a Clydesdale? It's just another strange saying that really doesn't make any sense. Now, if you said I had to pee like an old man with a somewhat dysfunctional prostate. That would make sense.

Mom's funeral was a week ago. It was a long and emotional day, capped off by a family luncheon at a restaurant near the cemetery. I like that we do that. It helps everybody through the day. Unfortunately, when that day was done I had to drive all the way home alone. From One Hundred and Eleventh Street on the Southside, to Peterson Avenue on the Northside. Oh, and it was now rush hour. It took me two hours to make that trip home. Unfortunately, as I made my way onto Lake Shore Drive by McCormick Place, I felt a soft urging from my bladder. I'm fine, I thought. I can make it home. My bladder and the rush hour traffic through downtown Chicago said otherwise. What had been a slow buildup of pressure had become unbearable by the time I reached the north end of Lake Shore Drive. I weighed my options. Option one, pull over into the median where the radar cop usually sits, and pee in the bushes. I felt that would be too dangerous, so I continued on. My next option was to stop at a gas station along Peterson, but as badly as I had to go, peeing in my pants seemed a better idea than a gas station bathroom. By the time I made the turn into our alley and hit the garage door opener, I could taste pee. There was only one option left. Because I knew I wouldn't make it up the stairs and past the greeting dogs in time, I peed in a bucket in the garage. That's when I thought of the old saying about race horses.

Grundy Sunday Evening

 

The Grand Nephew in Car Number Three. I'm Sure That Fence Will Hold.

In the summer of 1967 my friend Dave, his girlfriend, I and my girlfriend (Pause for gasp) went to the stock car races at Soldier Field every Friday night. I was seventeen and that's what I wanted to see. Speeding cars with the occasional crash. I'm surprised that girlfriend waited until February of 1968 to break up with me. The only downside of her breaking up with me was that I couldn't go on double dates with Dave and his girlfriend anymore. Not even if I offered to drive.

In the 1970s I still liked going to stock car races, but kind of liked the demolition derby part of the show much better. I went a few times with my friend Al to the Santa Fe Speedway near Chicago. No girlfriends. By this time I realized they weren't necessary and that going with Al worked out much better.

That was the last time I was at an automobile race track, until last Sunday. I, along with three of my sisters, my brother, various wives, husbands, and in-laws all went down to the Grundy County Speedway to watch my grand nephew race. I really enjoyed watching the young man fly around that racetrack, even if he didn't win. He was doing something I have always thought I could do. I've even practiced on the Dan Ryan Expressway. So, aside from that there were a few things I didn't like. For one thing, it was much louder than I expected and the ear plugs my sister handed me did little to hush the roar. The toilets smelled like they hadn't been cleaned in years. Finally, the seats my brother chose for us to watch his grandson race. They were right where the fourth turn met the straightaway in front of the stands. I've seen those videos. Usually grainy, black and white film from the 1960s, of race cars missing that turn and flying up into the spectators. All I could think of for the first few races was how much it was going to hurt when a ton of steel and rubber slammed into my head. After a few of the heats (Racing term for short qualifying races) I kind of forgot about how much it would hurt. Instead, in my head, I began writing the headline that might appear the next day in the Chicago Tribune. "ENTIRE FAMILY WIPED OUT IN HORRENDOUS RACE TRACK TRAGEDY."

Other than that, I had a wonderful time.

 

Sometimes Cars Do Fly