Once One of Our Hamsters Drowned in the Sump Pump Hole

 

The House With the Damp Basement

It's raining today. It rained yesterday. I was talking to my neighbor and she mentioned that all the houses at our end of the block used to flood when it rained. Not anymore. Chicago started something called The Deep Tunnel Project in 1975. They dug over a hundred miles of tunnels over three hundred feet below the city. Tunnels nine to thirty three feet in diameter to catch the rain and keep it out of our basements. It works, so far.

When I was a kid in Tinley Park, Illinois, there was no such thing like the Deep Tunnel. There were no sewage treatment plants. No, the developer who built our subdivision in the late 1940s simply ran drain pipes from the houses to Midlothian Creek, which ran through the middle of town. So when it rained and the creek rose, all that effluent would come back up those pipes and into the basements. My dad fought long and hard against the rising tide over the years. At first there was nothing he could do. It would rain and the basement would fill up with water. In that water would be turds from the entire subdivision, bits of shredded toilet paper, and an occasional balloon. At least I thought they were balloons. We made the best of the situation by turning our sandbox into a raft and floating around like pirates in our subterranean sea. Then Dad got the great idea of installing a pipe into the drain in the floor, where all the waste was gurgling up from. He called it a stand pipe. It was about four feet or so tall and when it would rain we could watch the water slowly rising towards the top of that pipe. It did kind of work sometimes. However, there were those extra heavy rains where the creek would overflow its banks and that stand pipe couldn't hold the flood back. That's when it would turn into a sewage fountain with turds popping up out of it and falling into the rising tide of our basement. After the stand pipe failed, Dad had a hole dug in the corner of the basement and put a sump pump in there. It was a big improvement over the stand pipe and worked well as long as the power didn't go out. So we still had the occasional flooding in our basement, but not as bad. Dad's final fix worked the best. He sold the house and we moved to the other side of town.

Four Hundred Miles in a Station Wagon (8 kids, 2 adults)

 

Mom enjoying her vacation at Bass Lake, Indiana.

When we were kids my dad never took us on fancy vacations. Unless you think a cabin on a lake with an outhouse for a toilet is fancy. I liked those vacations despite the sand in the bed, the nasty toilet fifty feet from the kitchen door, and a week in a tiny house that smelled funny. At least there was always a row boat and a lake of sorts to explore. Half the fun was the actual drive, usually between one hundred and two hundred miles. Plenty of time in the car for exciting things to happen, like the time the roof rack with all our luggage came loose and scattered across the highway.

In Mom's later years I encouraged her to start writing down some of her life experiences. She was in her nineties and had lived through the depression, World War II, and the birth of eleven children. Certainly there had to be a story there. As far as I knew she never did write it down. However, while going through her things my sister found a few hand written notes. One of the most entertaining was her account of a vacation trip to Tennessee in 1971. A trip I was not on because I was already a free adult living on my own. It was a four page letter to herself with nuggets like this one.

"Dad Locked himself out of the cabin on the way to the swimming area."

No explanation of how he got back in, or where the rest of the family was. But knowing my dad, it couldn't have been pretty. The letter starts out with this.

"In a station wagon with ten people. The first one hundred miles with the two youngest hanging over throw up bags."

For some reason Mom wrote the letter in the third person.

"Mother agrees to take over driving, and after only five minutes of driving turns off onto the wrong exit taking us completely off in the wrong direction. Big Daddy blows up and doesn't simmer down until we're back on the right road again."

I never heard Mom refer to Dad as 'Big Daddy' before. I kind of wish she had used that more often. It would have made my childhood more like living 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof'. Anyway, they made it to the cabin in Tennessee and it turned out to be a bit more rustic than Dad had bargained for.

"We are now living in a forest, a dense forest. The only other cabin I can see is the one the children are sleeping in. The road - four miles of it - is narrow and winding. Up and down steep hills. It's more wilderness than we had planned on. The 'swimming area' is a roped off bit of the lake, not the pool we had expected."

With a couple of days left in the vacation, it got very hot and humid. Everybody gathered in the air conditioned cabin and stayed there. Dad's reaction was exactly what I would expect.

"So we're just going to sit inside? I can do this cheaper at home."

So they packed up and drove back home. Vacation over, Dad got to sit in his favorite chair at home and saved himself a little bit of money. I love Mom's last line of her letter to herself.

"I guess we're just not a camping type of family."

Although, at least they had air conditioning. Something I never experienced on any of Dad's lake house vacations.

American Trust

 

In the spring of 1971 I was living on a hippie commune out in Iowa. The farm house we lived in was supported by a rock/blues/jazz group that the original founders had created. After moving out there I became the equipment guy because I kind of knew how to plug in the cables, and I owned a 1968 Volkswagen van. On a nice March day one of the folks who lived there suggested that we, she and I, take a trip to New York City. Her name was Kiva. Not her real name, but it was how we all knew her. So, along with another guy who we were going to drop off in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Kiva and I started off for New York. First stop on the way from Iowa was my mom and dad's house outside Chicago. Mom and Dad were not home. All I remember from that stop is a bunch of my younger sisters sitting in the kitchen, wondering why their older brother had brought these strange hippies into their home.

We continued on through Indiana, and through Ohio. As we passed through Pennsylvania and through the Appalachian Mountains, everything started to look gray. Gray skies, gray mountains, and gray rocks. We dropped our friend off in Allentown and all I could think was how depressing it seemed to be. More gray on gray. We traveled on to New York, which is another story. On the trip back to Iowa, on Interstate 80 in central Pennsylvania, the engine in my beloved Volkswagen blew up. It was on a rather steep incline that the little engine just couldn't handle. We were towed into the city of State College, where I left the van at the local VW repair shop. It turned out that this broke hippie could not afford the repairs. So I sold the van to the owner of the shop for two hundred dollars. He gave me one hundred and promised to send me another hundred in a week or so. I was so naive. I hitch hiked back to Iowa and waited, and waited. No money was ever sent.

I've been watching a series on Showtime called 'American Rust'. It is set somewhere in western Pennsylvania. It is depressing. The show reminds me of my trip back and forth through the state fifty years ago. It seemed to be a depressing place back then, and from the show it seems to be just as depressing now. Maybe it isn't all that bad. Maybe it is actually a very nice state to live in. All I know is that there is some asshole in State College who owes me one hundred dollars.

Old Dog - New Trick, Young Dog - Old Trick

 

Chandler is lying out in the yard, refusing to come in. It's ten o'clock and I want to go to bed, but I have to wait until this big mutt decides he wants to come back in the house.

You know that old saying, "You can't teach an old dog new tricks." It isn't true. Dogs learn new things their entire lives. Take Chandler for example. He's thirteen and one half years old. He has lumps on his body, his rear legs can barely support him, and he has the worst old dog-man breath you've ever smelled. Yet he has learned something. He learned it from Scout. She taught him that if you nag at me long enough, I'll give in and do something for you. Usually give out dog cookies. So now I have the two of them stare at me every evening and slowly start barking. Sometimes Scout starts with her high pitched, ear piercing bark. Other times Chandler will slowly begin with an almost silent, old dog-man, raspy bark. Yes, in his old age Chandler's bark has gone from a hearty, Earth shaking roar, to a barely audible rasp. Doesn't matter. I'll let it go on for a long time before I can't take it anymore, and both dogs get what they want.

And Chandler has taught Scout something. If you don't want to do what Daddy wants you to do, just lay down and go limp. Dead weight is the easiest way to say no. Chandler has been doing this lately in the back yard. I'll take him out, but when he's done doing his duty, he lays down and refuses to get up. I have a sling to help him with those nearly useless rear legs, but when I try to pick him up with the sling he just rolls over on his back. Doesn't matter if the grass is wet, or the weather is cold, he just lays there. Now Scout has begun using the dead weight refusal technique. Why do they only teach each other bad things?

 

Kids for Cars

 

I've never owned a child, so I'm not familiar with the steps they take from birth to thinking they can talk to grownups as if they know something.

On Saturday the folks in the 5800 block of our street organized a block party. It was the best of two things. A block party, and it didn't inconvenience me at all, because I live on the 5900 block. However, I did pitch in with one little thing. I drove my 1929 Ford down the alley and parked it in the middle of the 5800 block for the kids to examine. As the little children lined up to sit in it and touch it, I got to see how each age group related to such an old car. The first kid was probably not even two years old yet. Her mom lifted her up into the car and sat her in front of the giant steering wheel. Cute as could be, so I told her to press the little button in the middle of the steering wheel. Tiny little fingers tried and tried, but couldn't do it.

"Use your whole hand honey. That's right, now press." Mom said helpfully.

It surprised the kid at first when the car suddenly honked out a wheezy 'Ah-ooooh-ga'. Then she started giggling excitedly and pressed it again, and again.

"My turn, my turn.",  screamed a slightly older child, while another whined and cried out. A line formed and one by one each kid got to sit in the car and make the noise. "Ah-ooooh-ga!" I turned to one of the adults and asked if they had jumper cables ready (ha, ha). At the end of the line of kids were two older boys. About ten or eleven years old. They jumped into the car and immediately rolled up the windows and laid on the horn. I knew they couldn't really hurt anything. It simply made me happy to see kids interested in an old car.

When the two older boys finally had their fill and jumped out  of the car, one of them asked me, "How can you drive that without seat belts? It's illegal."

"It's grandfathered in." I told him, and explained what grandfathered meant. "It also doesn't have turn signals, or airbags."

The kid looked at me and said in a very assured voice, "That's illegal. You can't drive a car like that on the street."

Geez, what a little shithead I thought. Mostly  because he reminded me of when I was fifteen and our neighbor, Mr. Soltis was complaining about somebody speeding down our street. I, mister smarter than the adult, educated Mr. Soltis on speed limits.

"There is no speed limit sign on our street, so you can go up to forty five miles per hour." I informed him. Mr. Soltis didn't actually call me an asshole, but the tone of his voice said it all.

"Speed limit on a residential street is twenty miles per hour, whether there is a sign posted or not. You better learn it before you go for a driver's license."

He then turned away from me and continued to chat with the actual adults.