Goin' My Way

“I’ve got a beautiful feelin’

Everything’s goin’ my way.”

    “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’,” from “Oklahoma!”

After a week of record high temperature the mornings have been sunny and crisp with the afternoon temperature staying in the seventies – perfect weather for the Chesterton 5k race that Tom Wade participated in.

The Chesterton library has a stack of free books.  The only condition is that one is not allowed to return them.  I found “The Fourteenth Chronicle: Letters and Diaries of John Dos Passos” among the rejects.  According to the old-fashioned card in the flap at the back of the book, the last time someone checked it out was 1984.  I once thought books in the library would be there forever but evidently not.  For the time being at least, my Shavings issues are in a locked bookcase with other local history volumes.  In his youth Dos Passos was a radical but became disillusioned with FDR because he distrusted big government.  I loved his U.S.A. trilogy and Manhattan Transfer novel about New York bohemians during the 1920s.  Reflecting postwar disillusionment, one character laments, “We are the peewee generation.”

Corey Hagelberg and girlfriend Kate invited us for a vegetarian lunch at their place on top of a huge dune near Lake and Forest in Miller.  It took 80 steps to reach, and the ticks were so prevalent that they recommended taking our clothes off when we got home, inspecting our bodies and then showering when we got home.  They are hoping to convert a second house on their property into apartments where artists can stay and work in connection with the Miller Beach Arts and Creative District Karren Lee and others started.

I will be hanging an exhibit of Dale Flemings’s work at Lee Construction for Saturday’s Pop Up Art festival.  A couple months ago, I heard that Dale is poverty stricken, so I’m hoping to sell drawings he did for next to nothing that are reproduced in my 1998 “Lake Michigan Tales” issue and give him any proceeds.  Two of my favorites are of the old Michigan City Lighthouse and a rendering of artists ready to board the South Shore after a day at the dunes. 

Sunday we saw “Oklahoma” at the Valpo Memorial Opera House.  The 1943 Rogers and Hammerstein musical was dated and the plot pedestrian (a hired hand is the villain), but the songs were fun and the acting superb. A recent graduated from Valpo High School played Persian peddler Ali Hamim, and I’d have never guessed his age.  Afterwards we ate at Lucretia’s (I brought over half of my lasagna home) and then played a round of bridge with Dick and Cheryl.  Turned on the TV in time to relish Boston’s two-point victory over the Heat as James fouled out and Wade missed a three-point shot that could have won it.

At lunch Alan Lindmark complained that IUN wants to charge emeritus faculty a hundred dollars for parking stickers next year rather than continue to hand them out free.  He thinks the policy change violates the faculty constitution.  Hopefully the reason is that someone decided mailing them out to people who mostly don’t use them is a waste.  I’d hate to think someone resents my parking free.