"You want it to be one way. But it's the other way."
Today’s outing: The Dairy Queen at Irving Park and Central, then over to Narragansett to swing by my dad’s childhood home on Nashville Avenue. Headed down the crowded, brutally potholed avenue, Dad said, “Here’s Mount Olive Cemetery.” Where most of his family is interred. We turned in. I have a general idea where the relatives are buried–mostly his mother’s family, the Sieversens–but he has a precise sense of where to go. So there they were: his parents, his grandparents, many aunts, uncles, and cousins.
Kate drove up to Ripon, Wisconsin–everyone in unison: "the birthplace of the Republican Party"–to visit our old Berkeley friends Robin and Jim. I hung around the house with Dad for most of the afternoon and just at the moment I was about to succumb to the urge for an afternoon nap went out for a walk. From the Brekke North Side headquarters it's about a mile and a half out to the lake, and that's where I went. Then strolled up the beach in Loyola Park for half a mile taking in the wintry shore scene. Suddenly I realized a surfer was in the water.
"MONDAY SHOULD BE A DELIGHTFULLY DISMAL EARLY APRIL DAY."
That's out of the area forecast discussion from the Chicago office of the National Weather Service, a line of clear "look what's happening outside" prose in the midst of talk about steep lapse rates, negatively tilted troughs, cyclonic flows, and tightening gradients.
After a sufficient time away–decades, not years–you forget what April here can bring. The weather service provides a reminder of some snow records for this month, including a single snowfall of nearly 14 inches back in the 1930s.
But outside the record books, I remember an Easter on which we got about a foot of snow (the preceding Christmas featured what I remember as a tropically warm heavy rain; well, rain anyway). The year I turned 16, the first baseball game of our high school season was postponed because we got nearly a foot of snow (when we played the game, a week or two later, the snow was gone and but sunny weather was accompanied by a brutal cold snap. We scored a single run on a sacrifice fly, our pitcher threw a no-hitter — it was too cold to want to make much contact — and we had the first win in a season whose other highlight was the desertion of about half the team to go watch Jefferson Airplane play for free in Grant Park). And then there was the day I turned 21, going to school down at Illinois State and working at the college paper, The Vidette. We had a blizzard of Spackle-like snow. I was lonely and typically disconsolate. Turning 21 wasn't a drinking holiday, since the drinking age was 19 at the time. The real source of my pain was another night spent at the dorms with no prospect of a date or even a friendly conversation with one of the thousands of females nearby.
Oh, yeah, I got over it. But I haven't forgotten, now that I'm reminded. "Delightfully dismal early April."
[And Monday: More from the Tom Skilling and the Chicago Tribune's weather page on late season snow in Chicago: Snowless Aprils vs. Snowy Mays.]
Kate and I flew to Chicago this morning. "Morning." It was actually sometime toward the end of the night. The van shuttle that drove us over to San Francisco got to our house at 4 a.m., which meant we were up a little after 3.
Back in California, Saturday was the model of a spring day, meaning warm, clear and green. It was a pretty spring day in Chicago, too: clear and warm enough, low 50s, that you wouldn't mistake it for winter. I went out for a walk wearing jeans and a flannel shirt and noticed within a few blocks I was the only one not wearing a jacket. The wind was cutting, and it was cold in the shade.
Tomorrow and Monday are supposed to be a different matter. Snow's on the way, though much more is falling west and north than the forecasters say will come down here. Still, the next couple of days won't be mistaken for spring.
A favorite scene describing a spring snowstorm, from Louise Erdrich's "Love Medicine":
"… The snow was bright, giving back starlight. She concentrated on her feet, on steering them strictly down the packed wheel ruts.
"She had walked far enough to see the dull orange glow, the canopy of low, lit clouds over Williston, when she decided to walk home instead of going back there. The wind was mild and wet. A Chinook wind, she told herself. She made a right turn off the road, walked up a drift frozen over a snow fence, and began to pick her way through the swirls of dead grass and icy crust of open ranchland. Her boots were thin. So she stepped on dry ground where she could and avoided the slush and rotten, gray banks. It was exactly as if she were walking back from a fiddle dance or a friend's house to Uncle Eli's warm, man-smelling kitchen. She crossed the wide fields swinging her purse, stepping carefully to keep her feet dry.
"Even when it started to snow, she did not lose her sense of direction. Her feet grew numb, but she did not worry about the distance. The heavy winds couldn't blow her off course. She continued. Even when her heart clenched and her skin turned crackling cold, it didn't matter, because the pure and naked part of her went on.
"The snow fell deeper that Easter than it had in forty years, but June walked over it like water and came home."
It’s a Buick Roadmaster Deluxe. For sale for $4,000 if you’re looking for a project. It’s been parked at various spots around Mariposa and Alabama streets, a couple blocks from where I ply the radio news editor trade, for at least a month. (Those stacks in the background of the top photo–I’ve been looking at them for the last year and I haven’t yet investigated what defunct local manufacturing operation they might have been part of.)
At 18th and South Van Ness. I walked by a couple months ago at midday while exploring a different route to work. I haven’t investigated, but maybe the location is part of a bygone chain (on the other hand, the sign says “since 1955”). In any case, it’s the one and only Whiz burger stand I know. I haven’t yet sampled the fare.
It’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”:
It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
`By thy long beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp’st thou me ?
The Bridegroom’s doors are opened wide,
And I am next of kin ;
The guests are met, the feast is set :
May’st hear the merry din.’
He holds him with his skinny hand,
`There was a ship,’ quoth he.
`Hold off ! unhand me, grey-beard loon !’
Eftsoons his hand dropt he.
By my mother’s account, she went into labor sometime late on March 31, 1954. Dad drove her to a hospital on Chicago’s far South Side; she didn’t supply the detail on how she got to the hospital, but it’s the only way I can imagined it happened. The weather, from what I glean from weather records, was cold; March had ended with an 8-inch snowfall, and the And then, she said, they waited. She was in labor all the way through April Fool’s Day. Then around 9 in the morning on the 2nd, I made my debut. I’ll go light on further details.
So here I am, at the threshold of 55. I know it’s not one of those big decade numbers. Still, there’s some weight there for me. Maybe it’s the memory of my father losing his long-time job when he was 55. I was talking to my friend Pete about that episode recently and how back then, in the age before the mass layoff, getting fired or pushed out, especially from a job one had invested 25 years in, as my dad had, carried a sense of death with it. At 55, you weren’t a kid anymore. How were you supposed to pick up the pieces and continue? As it happened, my mom went to work and my father did put the pieces back together.
So, 55. I’ve found myself thinking about the group of kids I went through school with in the fringe suburbs of Chicago, kids who had birthdays around mine. Somehow, I’ve managed to keep track of a few of them. One’s a petroleum geologist, now working in Nigeria. One’s a job counselor for the emotionally disabled in the Sacramento Valley. One’s an atmospheric scientist in Chicago. Another runs a homeless advocacy group in Indianapolis. And one is a programmer-type down in Texas.
Odd to think of them all hitting this age. I remember them in First Communion class, or on the playground the day President Kennedy was shot, or helping run a classroom campaign for LBJ in fifth grade, in the band room at our district junior high school, or on the basketball court, softball diamond and football field (many of these people showed up in more than one of these scenes, along with a cohort of other friends, older and younger, who I’ve not forgotten).
Not kids anymore, but I knew them when they were.
Hello, April.
Goodbye, March. Goodbye, February. Goodbye, January.
Honestly. Where’d you go already?
