Nineteen

 

Lila at nineteen

That's a photo of my mom at the age of nineteen, probably taken by my father who was not yet eighteen years old. When that photo was taken Mom and Dad had known each other for two years. I look at that picture and wonder, what did Mom see in her future? I know that Al Putz was part of that vision. It's written on the back of one of the first photos she had of him. It says something like, "I want him." She got him. They were married exactly two years after this photo was taken.

Did Mom know that she would be taken out of her city neighborhood and dropped into a tiny rural town, twenty miles southwest of Back of the Yards? It doesn't seem so far today, but back then there were no interstates. Also, the city ended around eighty seventh street. From there on it was corn fields and farms. I remember being nineteen, with a long and unknown future in front of me. At that age you have no idea. I'm sure my mom did not think she would be mother to eleven. Was she expecting to live another eighty years when that photo was taken? She probably didn't even think about such a thing. Yet Mom did live almost to one hundred years. Fifty seven of them with my dad, who passed in March of 2000.

I sure hope Mom was happy with how it all turned out. I think she was happy. Seriously, how could she not be happy? She had me for a son.

Alan Gets Beat Up By Ninety Three Year Old, Henry.

 

My arm is bruised, my ribs and knees hurt, but I eventually won. In my garage is a ninety three year old Ford that is... or was one hundred percent stock as it came from the factory. Over the weekend I changed one thing. I removed the generator and replaced it with an alternator. The reason was that I want to add some extra tail lights. Henry Ford built these cars with only one small, dim light in the rear. Also, my headlights will work better. Anyway, on Saturday I watched the video on how to install my new alternator. It looked so easy. The guy removed the old generator and slapped the alternator in the car in only eight minutes. So easy... so easy. That's the giveaway right there. If it looks easy, It will not be. Removing the generator was easy, but the old Ford just didn't want that new fangled part in him. First of all, the bolt was too long and rubbed against the fan belt. That's how I got my arm all bruised up, banging it against the radiator shell. Which is another point. I kept going back to the video to see what I was doing wrong and about the third time through it I noticed that the guy was installing the alternator on a stripped down Model A. No radiator shell, no fenders, no hood. He had great access to do the job. They probably also made sure everything fit before they even turned on the camera. At one point I was instructed to insert two washers between the engine block and the alternator bracket. Out of the four washers I had on hand, I lost three. I saw them slip out of my greasy fingers and disappear into thin air. When the cursing got too loud and I worried that the neighbors would complain, I gave up. I would continue the fight on Sunday. Early Sunday I went to Home Depot to find a shorter bolt and buy more washers. In the screws, bolts, and nuts aisle Home Depot had rows of flat drawers. On the outside is a description of what is in them. All orderly, and color coded. Then when you open the drawer that says what you need is inside, you find a jumbled mess of nothing that you need. Torn open bags of bolts, washers, and nuts, all the wrong size.

Long story too long now to make short, I got the alternator installed. It actually works and I now will feel a bit safer driving my old Ford at night. Hopefully nothing else will need attention for a week or so. I need to heal.

Roselle Road

 

My cousin used to call me "Map Mind" because I could find any place after looking at or driving a route just once. That's why I was so good at driving a taxi and delivery van in my youth.

Last Thursday I had a lunch date with my sister, Peggy. She picked a restaurant she considered to be easy for me and her to both get to. She lives out in DuPage County, I live in Chicago. The place she found for lunch was out on Roselle Road, right off the tollway. So I looked it up on Google maps. I have a problem with looking up locations on a computer map. I grew up finding places on a paper maps and I find it hard to see the entire layout of an area on a computer screen. Anyway, I looked at the Google and to me it looked like Roselle Road was two exits past O'Hare Airport on the Northwest Tollway. Not that far. So on Thursday morning I got on the tollway and started driving. I drove and I drove, for miles looking for the sign that said 'Roselle Road Exit'. Surely after driving for half an hour I should have seen that sign. I figured I had missed it somehow, which is not like me. So I got off the tollway and checked it out on my Samsung very smart phone. No, I had not passed Roselle Road. In fact it was fifteen minutes further according to the Samsung. However, the Illinois Tollway System being the thing that it is, did not allow me to re-enter the highway heading west. I had to do the last fifteen minutes of driving on secondary streets. Well, godammit. Turns out that suburban street signage sucks. You're doing fifty miles per hour and as you come up to a major intersection, there is no notice of what road you are crossing. Just a little sign overhead as you pass on through. Much too late to make a turn. Of course I missed Roselle Road and would have to do a U-turn. Which is illegal in Illinois. Totally legal in Florida, not Illinois. And, of course, just as I started my U-turn a Roselle police car pulled up right behind me. I immediately aborted the U-turn and drove an extra mile before I could make my way back.

I really do hate the suburbs. Give me flying bullets, carjackers, and bus fumes any day over suburbs.

Mini Me

 

A few years ago Mark had me stick a mint plant in the ground next to the fence. It was one little mint plant that grew, and grew, and spread until it lined the fence for fifteen feet. Not only that, it spread under the fence into my neighbor's yard. She didn't care. She stuck a bunch of it in a large baggie and took it to New York with her where she made mojito's for her New York friends. (She's got a good job and also has homes in New York and Los Angeles.) I've left the mint alone for the most part, unless it tries to break out of the area I have allowed it to have. That's when I hit it with the lawn mower, which does not bother it in the least. Within three days it has retaken the lawn and more.

About five or so weeks ago my friend, Chuck gave me a plant. It was a tiny thing with only three leaves.

"It's a mini pumpkin plant. They don't get any bigger than a softball."

So I took a little shovel and dug a hole in front of the mint. I stuck the 'mini' pumpkin plant in the hole and marked it with two stakes so I would know where I had planted it. For a few days it was touch and go. I wasn't sure if it would actually grow. I needn't have worried. After one good rainy day it took off like some kind of science fiction monster, growing at least six or more inches a day. I realized I had a problem when it tried to grab my ankle as I took out the garbage. It has now completely smothered the mint and is reaching out for my rose of sharon bush. So I have had to trim it a few times, but each time it grows back longer and bigger. I have rooted around under those leaves and I believe I may have at least two dozen mini pumpkins in a couple of months. Not exactly sure what to do with them, but they'll be there. I do have to hand it to the mint. It is putting up a good fight and I do see a few sprigs poking up from under the mini pumpkin plant. The fact is, the mint will win. It's a perennial. Mini pumpkin is only a scary annual.

Potty Story

 

I was nearly an adult the first time I found myself in a 'fancy' public women's bathroom. I was shocked. They had a whole living room in there. They had a sofa and an end table with a lamp on it. It was very nice and you couldn't even see a toilet from the sofa area. Don't ask me why I was in there because I don't remember, just that I was there. So for the next fifty or sixty years, every time a woman excused herself to go to the bathroom in a public space, I imagined she needed to rest on that sofa. Men's toilets were a whole different story. From early childhood on, I was exposed to some of the weirdest public bathrooms imaginable. It's where I learned the little poem that went like this. "Here I sit broken hearted. Tried to shit but only farted." It was usually carved into the stall wall. Pre-pubescent Alan found that to be very clever. I also found even worse drawings scratched on the walls of toilet stalls. Graphic depictions of what pervy young men thought women looked like naked. There were also scratched or written on those walls,  invitations by men to engage with other men. In the 1950s through the 1970s, public mens bathrooms were an uncivilized free for all.

I haven't been in such a restroom like that in quite awhile. I find every restroom I visit these days to be clean and unsullied. But then again, I haven't been to a Cook County Forest Preserve potty in many, many years. Which by the way, do the women's outhouses in the forest preserves have sofas in them?

Pimple

 

Around the age of fifteen my face looked like the Pacific 'Ring of Fire'. Pimples waiting to explode like so many tiny volcanoes. I did everything right. Washed my face, used pimple cream, and tried not to pick at them. That was difficult because there's nothing as satisfying as popping a pimple. Every time I thought the onslaught of teen skin eruptions had settled down, a new giant pimple would emerge. I could go to bed at night with only a minor pimple puss and wake up in the morning with a red beast pushing out of my face. It was a troubling time that many kids went through before the invention of decent acne treatments in the 1970s. Lucky for me, the photographer who did the photos for the high school yearbook, was an artist with the airbrush. To look at my yearbook photo you'd never know I had a red giant on the end of my nose. Now, fifty four years later you would think the problem of pimples would be behind me. It is not. Yesterday morning I woke up to find one of what my mom used to call 'blind' pimples, had taken up residence in my ear. It's not popable, and it's painful. That's what I get for wishing I was  young again. A pimple.

The photographer was an artist