Everyone’s in town. The evening we had sushi at a place we’ve been to before. The place makes especially good sushi, we all agree. My own favorite is their unagi (eel).
What’s sushi for if not to dig in? The piece in the chopsticks is in fact unagi.
On the way home, we drove to the lights that Elk Grove Village displays near some of its municipal buildings.
Mostly my camera isn’t much for taking night shots — or more probably, I don’t know how to set it — but I like that one.
A few weeks ago, I oversaw the Great VHS Purge. Tapes unused for years were either donated to a resale shop — I still see them for sale there, so someone must buy and use them — or thrown away, in the case of those I was sure no one would want. Home recorded stuff, mainly.
A few tapes survived the purge, mainly because they were not in the main stash, formerly in a cabinet in the laundry room. I found one today, tucked away elsewhere: Bugs Bunny’s Greatest Hits, a 38-minute tape with a copyright date of 1990.
Stuck on the body of the cassette is a yellow sticker that says:
Please rewind or pay rewind fee of $2.00. Blockbuster Video.
That tells me that I bought the tape used at a Blockbuster at some forgotten moment in the very late 20th century or very early 21st. It also reminds me why exactly no one, except maybe stockholders, mourned the passing of Blockbuster Video and its ilk.
I was moving a random collection of maps — the only kind I have — from one place to another in my house the other day, and this photo dropped out of the folds of one of them.
An unretouched image of Aunt Sue and Uncle Ken, with their Mercedes-Benz 190D. According to the writing on the back, taken in South Dakota, where they lived at the time. The time being November 7, 1960, also written on the back.
I found the picture in San Antonio a few years ago, tucked among others my mother had, and decided to take it home for scanning. Then it vanished. I assumed I misplaced it at my mother’s house, but instead it hitched a ride among some maps I must have brought back.
The 190D was sold from 1958 to 1961. What they went through to bring one to South Dakota, I don’t know.
The date also fascinates. Exactly one day before the 1960 election. The next day Nixon carried South Dakota handily, 55.4% to 44.5%, but I have no doubt they voted for Kennedy, and we know how the larger election turned out. But all that was still in the future for them at the moment.
College campuses, at least when the weather is temperate, have a lot to recommend them as walking destinations. Green space with expansive trees, good-looking or at least interesting buildings, the possibility of public art, inexpensive museums sometimes, a youthful vibe but also historical tidbits, and overall no admission charge.
And the certain knowledge that you (I) don’t have to show up for class, finish assigned reading or write papers. That’s all done.
Before we dropped Ann off at her dorm on Sunday and returned home, we all took a stroll through Illinois Wesleyan University, which is in Bloomington, though not to far south of ISU. I’m glad to report that its motto is still in Latin.
Even better, I knew what it meant without looking it up because of the long-ago Latin teaching efforts of Mrs. Quarles and Dr. Nabors. But I have to say that even a little knowledge of the etymologies of the English words “science” and “sapient” would be enough to guess “knowledge” and “wisdom.”
Illinois Wesleyan, which as far as I can tell is only tenuously connected to the Methodist church, is pleasantly green though not quite the arboretum that is ISU.
A good many buildings were newer-looking than I expected for a college founded in 1850.
But not all of them.
There was a scattering of artwork, such as “Aspiration” by Giles Rayner (2015), a British artist specializing in water sculpture.
For whatever reason, no water flowed when I was there. It would have been cooler, literally and figuratively, had it been.
Elsewhere is “Family With Dog” by Boaz Vaadia (also 2015), a Brooklyn-based artist.
That second picture is my own composition, “Daughter With Dog With Family With Dog” (2021).
Summer is lingering late this year. Sunny and in the mid-80s F. today.
Spent some time on the deck this evening, after dark, listening to the crickets — and the traffic. Looking at Jupiter and a waxing crescent Moon. Marveling at how not-cold or even cool it is. Warm enough, at least during the first few hours after dark, to sit around comfortably in a t-shirt. (One I bought in North Pole, Alaska, featuring the outline of a moose.)
Most the foliage is still green, though the honey locusts along the streets are yellow. But not the one in my back yard. Maybe it’s the carbon monoxide. The grass is still green too. I mowed the back yard just before sunset today. Last time this year, I hope.
Previous Octobers have sometimes been more October-like. Sometimes not. A picture from October 2006.
One thing I don’t do any more: visit places to entertain small children. They have grown, and usually entertain themselves, as it should be.
My brother Jay took this picture of me in the back yard in San Antonio, as I displayed a bit of regional pride. I have no memory of it, but it was about 50 years ago. This is the unretouched image.
This is a bit retouched, using the simple program I have on my laptop. It will never be a great image, but then again not bad for one taken with an Instamatic 104, the print of which has been sitting in a photo album for decades.
A monochromic version, which has its interests.
One more, using one of the buttons that comes with photo editing system. I played around with it until I found one I liked.
A nearby photo processing shop, Fox Photo, developed the film, and at that time always put the month and year on the edge, along with its red fox mascot. JUN 71 it says, but that doesn’t mean the photo was taken then.
I have another photo from the same batch taken at my grandmother’s house. That one had to have been taken before she died, which was in January 1971. So maybe the back yard image is from the same summer, I assume 1970. On the other hand, the camera could have easily taken pictures on the same roll of 24 or 36 images both summers. We didn’t take a lot of pictures, and sometimes the camera would sit around for a long time before a roll was used up.
Anyway, ca. 1971 is close enough. A nice, round 50 years. It occurs to me looking at my much younger self that a lot can happen to a fellow over that many years.
Ann is now a student at the Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois. From now on, August 14, 2021 will be the day she went to college. Such dates seem to be creeping further into August, but I only have a small sample. My own such day was August 25 and Lilly’s August 18.
ISU is a little closer than UIUC, only about two hours on the road to Springfield and St. Louis. As completely normal for August in Normal, it was hot. That didn’t keep anyone from moving in.
The oddest thing I saw this time wasn’t a TV or bottled water, but a fellow with a turntable and a vinyl record collection. State-of-the-dorm gear in — 1979, as I recall (I didn’t have one).
Her building, Watterson Towers, is enormous, and looks old enough for me to have lived there as a student. Yep, it opened in 1968.
The tallest building in Bloomington-Normal and, according to some sources, the tallest between Chicago and St. Louis.
A nugget I found about the building reported by WGLT, the school’s NPR station, last summer: “Illinois State University said Thursday it will rename floors in the Watterson Towers residence hall in the wake of nationwide upheaval and a renewed dialogue on race and history.
“… every five floors in both towers are called a ‘house.’ The university named those houses for the nation’s first 10 secretaries of state: Van Buren, Clay, Marshall, Madison, Adams, Pickering, Monroe, Randolph, Smith, and Jefferson. Eight out of the 10 were involved in slavery. Several would be elected president after serving as secretary of state…”
Guess which two didn’t own slaves. That would be Adams, as in John Quincy, and Van Buren.
“The entire Watterson Towers complex was named for a beloved professor on campus and that name will not change,” WGLT concluded.
As far as I can tell, the “houses” are now North, A through E, and South, A through E.
Ann found her room and we moved all her stuff in.
It’s a tiny room that she shares with a roommate. Again, the way a dorm should be.
Last week, I found myself at the Arctic Circle. Or so the sign said. I didn’t bother to check with GPS, since I knew it was close enough, like the Prime Meridian line in Greenwich, England. I posed with it. That’s the tourist thing to do, especially when you’ve come a long way.
A fleeting but memorable moment there at 66 degrees, 33 minutes North, early during my recent visit to Alaska, which ran from July 26 to July 31. Before that, I flew to Seattle to spent a long weekend with Lilly, who has established a life in that city. I also visited some of my old friends — stretching back to college and high school — now resident in that part of the country.
On the first day in Seattle, July 23, Lilly and I walked from her apartment in the Wallingford neighborhood (near Fremont) over to Gas Works Park under a warm summer sun. That was one of the first places I ever visited in Seattle in ’85, long before the notion of walking anywhere with a grown daughter. After an afternoon nap (for me), we had a delightful take-out dinner at Bill and Gillian’s back yard in Edmonds, with another friend, Matt, joining us.
On Saturday the 24th, I had breakfast up the street from Lilly’s with a high school friend, Louis, whom I hadn’t seen in… 40 years? Late in the morning, Lilly and I went to the Seattle Art Museum, which has quite the collection, arrayed in galleries each featuring a certain genre or artistic theme – usually a radically different one from the neighboring galleries. Out to smash that paradigm called “chronology” or “art history,” I suppose.
That afternoon, we went to the Ballard Locks, formally known as the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks, which connect Puget Sound with Lake Washington, a worthwhile suggestion of Jay’s. Not as impressive as the Panama Canal, Lilly said, but still a feat of 1910s engineering. That evening, old age rested (me) and youth went out (Lilly). That meant that the next morning, youth was a lot more tired than old age during the ferry ride and drive to spend the day at Olympic National Park, where we took a hike along Hurricane Ridge and then a walk to see Marymere Falls.
On July 26, I flew to Fairbanks, my base for the rest of the week. I didn’t have a rental car at first, so I got around via cabs and municipal buses in roughly equal measure – the former being infinitely more expensive than the latter, since the buses have been free since the pandemic hit. I took in the excellent Museum of the North on the sprawling campus of the University of Alaska Fairbanks and visited downtown Fairbanks long enough to get dinner.
The next day, I made my way to a general aviation runway near the airport and took a tour that involved flying in a small plane to Coldfoot, Alaska, which isn’t even a town, but rather a camp on the Dalton Highway, about 250 miles north of Fairbanks. North of Coldfoot, there are no services for 240 miles, until Deadhorse.
We didn’t continue further north. The tour then headed southward by bus on the gravel road that is the Dalton, stopping at a few places, including the Arctic Circle sign.
On July 28, I picked up a rental car and spent some time looking around Fairbanks, including the Birch Hill Cemetery on the outskirts of town, and then suburban North Pole, Alaska, for a look at the curiosities there. Mainly, the Santa Claus House. From there I headed south on Alaska 3, a two-lane road to Anchorage. I didn’t go to that city, but rather to a hotel near the entrance of Denali National Park, where I spent the night. Along that road, I unexpectedly found a presidential site.
The next day, I took a bus tour of the national park, which took us along the only road in the park to see magnificent vistas and animals along the way. We saw many of each. We also saw Denali itself for a short time without a shroud of clouds, gleaming white among the brown mountains. About 600,000 people visited Denali NP in 2019, a record, and I understand the attraction.
That evening, or rather during the long twilight afternoon, I drove back to Fairbanks, only about 90 miles. On the morning of July 30, I spent time futzing around downtown Fairbanks, this time using the rental car, occasionally marveling that I was in the furthest north U.S. city.
A heavy lunch made me tired, so I returned to my room and napped and read and wrote postcards and watched YouTube and regular TV. Even tourists need time off. If the trip had ended then, I would have been more than satisfied, but I had scheduled one more day.
It was a good one. Better than I expected. I’d considered going to a hot spring about 60 miles from Fairbanks, but I’d had enough of long drives, so instead I visited another cemetery, some churches, a couple of neighborhoods and had a lighter lunch than the day before.
That meant I was ready for the Fountainhead Antique Auto Museum in the afternoon. I almost didn’t go. Two museums seemed like enough for this trip. But I figured I’d go look at some old cars for an hour or so, since I was nearby anyway. I was astonished at the place. Not only was it an excellent car museum, it was an excellent museum, period: an amazing collection expertly displayed and curated.
That wasn’t quite all. I spent a little more time before returning to the airport walking on the trails of Creamer’s Field Migratory Waterfowl Refuge, including its boreal forest trail, a term that evokes the trackless reaches not much further out of town. My July 31 flight from Fairbanks was a redeye, bringing me home early today.
My senses had to work overtime to take in all that I experienced. Alaskan vistas tend to be intense, in spots sweeping far to the distance; more expansive than I’d ever seen, besting even the Grand Canyon or the Canadian Rockies or the Gobi Desert. Roads took me through vast forested square miles without much human presence. On learning that there are really only six main species of trees in the Alaskan forests, and that one of them is the quaking aspen, I started noticing them everywhere. At one rest stop, I listened to the wind blow through a stand of maybe half a dozen quaking aspens, a distinctive rustle I’ve heard in my own back yard, only magnified.
Mostly the temps were in the 60s and 70s, and as high as 80, though a rainy cool day on the Dalton made the gravel crunch and the mud stick, and some of it yet remains dried on my hiking shoes. As the days passed, I started noticing the hours-long twilight and the never-quite dark of the night, strange to contemplate, if you’re not used to it. The signs and businesses and other details along the way in Fairbanks spoke to a strong regional identity, as much as in Texas.
At first, Fairbanks itself didn’t impress. The Lubbock of the far north, I thought. But the longer I stayed, the more I began to appreciate its light traffic, historic spots, and restaurants that wouldn’t be out of place in any much larger American city.
And its oddities. Perhaps none as odd as the green pyramid at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, in front of the engineering building.
The text is here.
The Alaska leg of the trip was a little expensive, at least after arrival, because the airfares to get there and away were the least expensive part of the trip. Everything else in Alaska is expensive. But I have to add: entirely worth it.
It’s been a year of getting near Canada — Buffalo and Detroit so far — without crossing the line, since the border remains stubbornly closed even now.
That wasn’t the case 15 years ago this month, when we drove from Illinois to Alberta by way of the Dakotas and other places. At the time I wrote: “So, to sum up: very long drives, a lousy exchange rate, high fuel costs. Was it worth it? Was it ever.”
What is it about mountains? Pre-modern generations considered them obstacles to their forward motion. Now that we have mountain roads and tunnels, we admire the view. Do people who live close to mountains take trips to see flatlands? That makes me think of busloads of Swiss out admiring Kansas, but I don’t think it works that way.
Anyway, it was a trip of wide horizons, long roads, lofty mountains, mighty waters (liquid and frozen), endless forests, vivid wildflowers, sweeping Canadian farms, campsites, elk and bears and bison, clouds of mosquitos, national parks, vistas and towns of the tourist and non-tourist variety.
Moraine Lake and the Valley of the Ten Peaks. Too good a vista not to post again.
This looks like a view from some remote spot, but actually I was standing in back of the Banff Springs Hotel in Banff, which was a sight all its own.
This view, on the other hand, is roadside on the Icefields Parkway, which remains one of the great drives of my life. A place called Moose Meadows.
More Alberta views.
I told Ed Henderson (d. 2016) I’d take the cap he sent me various places. I haven’t lately, but I did for a while.
The girls had a good trip.
Even if they don’t remember much, in the case of Lilly, or anything at all, in the case of Ann.
Back again after the Memorial Day weekend, when it will be June already. June, now that’s a fine month.
Lilly arrived for a short visit today. We all went out to a restaurant to eat this evening. Sounds ordinary, but that was the first time since March 2020. We went to the last place we all went together that month, SGD, or So Gong Dong, a Korean place with about a dozen locations in the Midwest and on the Eastern seaboard. It’s a wonderful place, glad it survived.
My meal. 
As usual with a commencement program that lists everyone’s full names, I spent some time during Ann’s graduation on Monday examining those names, and again just now. As usual, the variety is remarkable.
Last names, for instance: Ahmed, Awdziejczyk, Bhandar, Cwik, Degrazio, Garcia, Gomberg, Jayawardena, Jones, Kaspari, Kobe, Lavrynovych, Mapembe, McCoy, Michalowski, Nguyen, O’Connor, Onilegbale, Picadi, Schoefernacker, Shah, Stribling, Wang.
Common names aren’t so common. There are no Smiths and two Joneses, three Browns and one Johnson (and a single Johnston) and a pair of Williamses. There are four Garcias and three Sanchezes but only two Gonzalezes and one Hernandez and one Gomez. Rodriguez is fairly common: seven. No one is named Kim, though there is a Lim. The aforementioned Wang is the only one.
Far and away the most common surname among the Class of ’21 is Patel. How many? Twenty-one. It’s a common name from Gujarat state on the west coast of India, and apparently Patels are well-represented in the diaspora.
One reason: Idi Amin. “When Idi Amin turfed out some 100,000 Indians (mostly Gujaratis) from Uganda in 1972, most of them descended on Britain before peeling off elsewhere,” notes the Economic Times of India. The timing was right, since the U.S. had junked its racist immigration policies that effectively kept out most South Asians only in 1965.
“There are said to be more than 500,000 Patels scattered across the world outside India, including some 150,000 each in Britain and the US,” the paper continues. A good many in the northwest suburbs of Chicago, clearly. Then there’s this associated term, which I’d never heard before.
During research for an article not long ago, I came across the persnickety food site Eat This Not That!, whose very title screams judgmentalism. One article is called “20 Vegetarian Foods That Are Surprisingly Aren’t.”
The subhead: These supposedly animal-free foods will make you gag, regardless of your dietary lifestyle.
I don’t have anything against principled vegetarianism or veganism, though I don’t plan to be either. But I do think an article that essentially says, Look how gross food additives are! is an exercise in simplemindedness. Overthink just about any food and you can say it’s repulsive.
The additives the articles objects to include animal bones, sheep’s wool, pork fat, shellfish, bird features, beaver musk, crushed beetles, fish bladders, pig hooves and calf stomachs. I don’t see that list and think, ew, gross. I think damn, human beings are awfully clever, using the most unlikely things to improve our food. Is that not a virtue among primal peoples anyway — using every part of the animal?
My favorite entry:
If you’re eating … Lucky Charms
You’re also consuming … Animal Bones
Those marshmallow moons, clovers and horseshoes are made with gelatin, derived from animal collagen (aka cartilage, skin, tendons, bones). True veg-heads — and those who keep kosher, and cannot mix milk and meat — have known this for years, staring regretfully at the taunting leprechaun. Also containing gelatin: Smorz, Fruity Marshmallow Krispies, and Rich Krispies Treats Squares.
There may be legitimate reasons not to eat a lot of sugar-coated cereal, but animal collagen doesn’t strike me as one of them.