“Old age should burn and rave at
close of day
Rage, rage against the dying of
the light”
Dylan
Thomas, “Do not Go Gentle into that Good Night”
Watching
the Cubs defeat the Nationals on TBS, I saw far too many commercials but took
note when one by Goboldly (evidently a biopharmaceutical consortium) quoted the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas about battling symptoms of old age. “Big
Pharma” can easily afford to bankroll the classiest of ads. A Volkswagen commercial used nostalgia to
attract baby boomers and their wannabies by showing hippies in VW buses at
Woodstock with Joe Cocker singing “With a Little Help from My Friends.” I got a
good laugh seeing Snoop Dog being touted as the upcoming host for a revival of
“Joker’s Wild,” a quiz show Dave loved when a pre-schooler.
The Cubs
triumphed in the finale of the five-game series thanks in large part to a
successful pick-off play at first when Nationals player José Lobaton took his
foot of the bag for an instant and Anthony Rizzo kept the tag on him. The camera showed manager Dusty Baker
grimacing when the umpires announced their final decision. Dusty managed the Cubs for four years,
beginning in 2003 (the ill-fated year of Bartman), and, in my opinion, was
unfairly blamed for things beyond his control.
above, Lobaton picked off; below, Dusty Baker with trademark toothpick
After three
straight losses in Fantasy Football, Jimbo Jammers got more points than any
other team thanks to big days by Jordon Howard, Carlos Hyde, Antonio Brown,
Kirk Cousins, and the Ravens special teams, scoring TDs on kickoff and punt
returns. Cousins not only passed for 330
yards and two TDs but ran one in and rushed for a total of 26 yards. Tough luck for Anthony’s The Powerhouse, which had
the second most points.
Toni
fell and aggravated her already injured knee but gamely went with us to
Northside Diner in Chesterton for breakfast prior to gaming. Dave’s high school classmate and friend Wayne
Thornton did Northside’s outside mural. For the first time in many months, we
played Air Lords, an Evan Davis invention.
During a day of record-breaking
rainfall Toni also gutted out a trip to Outback Steakhouse and then finished
first in bridge. Hosts Connie and Brian
Barnes are both my age. On a bureau, I
spotted a birthday card highlighting the year 1942. Most items had to do with wartime prices and
news, but one mentioned the internment of over 100,000 Japanese-Americans.
Thanks
to a DNA ancestry search, Helen Booth, a friend from duplicate bridge,
discovered that she has two half-sisters.
Her father evidently took off shortly after Helen was born. It was during the Great Depression and may
have been an act of desperation. Helen
never saw or heard from him again. Back
then, family secrets and so-called skeletons in the closet were not
uncommon. My great-aunt Grace and grandpa Elwood Metzger
both had lovers but kept up appearances by not living together. Great-aunt Ida M. Gordon, who lived with us,
had evidently gotten swept off her feet by a sharpie from Philadelphia who
deserted her soon after they married. At
least that’s the official story. Not
only did I never ask Aunt Ida about him, my mother never gave me a clear sense
of what happened.
Library
staff member Anne Koehler asked me to proofread an upcoming Portage Historical
Society Bulletin. I thought she meant
the entire thing and gave her a couple good suggestions, but Anne was referring
to an excerpt from my Portage Shavings
issue that mentioned recently deceased Irline Holley being a founding member of
the Portage Historical Society. Anne also loaned me Matthew A. Werner’s “Season
of Upsets,” about the 1950 Cinderella Union Mills basketball team, which upset
Michigan City Elston to win the Sectional before bowing to Hammond High.
Hammond lost in the Regional finals to Lafayette Jefferson, which in turn was
upset in the state championship by tiny Madison (student population: 270).
Ron
Cohen’s son Joshua passed away, a gentle soul in his mid-40s. We knew Josh well before he moved with his
mom to Indianapolis (once, setting off a firecracker on July Fourth, we feared
he’d blown off a finger) and then again as an adult. Whenever he’d see me, he’d flash a winsome
smile and be interested in how I was doing.
Josh overcame some hard knocks before finding a good woman and a decent
job and fathering son DeQuane. He had a
fetching smile and a good heart, and Ron is taking the loss hard.
An
article by former Indiana Poet Laureate Norbert Krapf in the Summer 2017 issue
of Traces highlighted the life and
poetry of Etheridge Knight, a Mississippi native and Korean War veteran reborn
in prison, where he served an eight-year sentence for stealing ten dollars to
support a drug addiction. His most famous poem in “Feeling Fucked Up”
Norbert
Krapf wrote: “Even if we don’t like poems
in which the ultimate swear word is allowed to rampage free, we must admit that
few poems in our language express better how ‘lowdown’ lost love can bring us.”
6+-
.
Post-Tribune columnist Jerry Davich wrote
movingly about 11-year-old Ben Edwards, whose parents died last month as a
result of a murder-suicide. Michael
Watkins apparently shot his wife, jewelry maker and artist Leila Edwards, and
then took his own life. Speaking with Davich at the home of his maternal grandparents
Edward and Donna Edwards, Ben asked that his photo be taken with pictures of both
parents. Leila owned Wonderland Stained
Glass and Ben’s Bodacious BBQ Bakery and Deli in Miller, named for her son. He is a fifth grader at Discovery Charter
School in Chesterton, where James and Becca graduated from. Ben told Davich he likes math and science,
participated in spell bowl and chess club and hopes to become an engineer.
Davich wrote:
When Watkins'
restaurant opened in January, Ben helped his father, working the cash register,
taking customers' orders and selling his own homemade baked goods. “Cookies, brownies, cinnamon rolls, banana
bread, lots of other stuff,” Ben recalled proudly. “He's quite the little chef," Anthony Edwards said. “He enjoys baking because of the science
behind it.” Ben smiled again.
His mother was a
talented stained-glass artist and jewelry maker who taught her many skills to
school students, curious friends and, of course, to Ben. “My mom taught me everything she knew,” Ben said. “Or I just picked it up by watching her.”
Viki Williams with summer "sons" Andy Shipman, Aaron Cook, and Kyle Heyne
On Jerry
Davich’s website, Viki Williams share Gary memories:
I grew up on Wabash on the dead end street. Railroad tracks behind
my house and 4th Ave in front. As kids we used to go up under the overpass and
write on the concrete with chalk. I often want to go there to see if anything
is still there. It was protected
from the weather, so who knows? Our parents always told us that bums slept
there...except we never saw anyone and it didn’t scare us. We just felt they
were passing through on the trains. The people who live there are still taking
care of the street. I left in 1971, and our next-door neighbors are still
there. The Pennsylvania Station is long gone (used to put coins on the tracks
and were scared we would derail a train.) That is the part that is overgrown.
We would take pieces of cardboard and slide down the hill, play baseball in the
triangular section at the end of the street, and all kinds of games in the
street. We would go to Popsicle Mary's, which was in the basement of the lady's
house where she had a freezer and several gumball machines that she kept full
of gumballs and prizes. We would go to Station 8 and have lunch with the
firemen. The only one I remember was Sgt. Calloway because he would play
basketball with the neighborhood kids. We would play kickball against the
pieces of wood at the Gary Sign Company and not get yelled at because we did no
damage. I so miss that.
Tori was
in her Grand Valley school’s homecoming court, and sister Miranda, a graduate, volunteered
for the dunk tank.
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