“Don’t knock the weather; nine-tenths of the people couldn’t start a conversation if it didn’t change once in a while.” Kin Hubbard
Hoosier Frank McKinney “Kin” Hubbard (1868-1930) was a cartoonist and journalist whom Will Rogers called “America’s greatest humorist.” Kurt Vonnegut often quoted him. In “Slaughterhouse Five” he referenced the witticism, “It’s no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.” The same Hubbard quote appeared again in “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.”
Chicagoland suffered through several days of record low temperature, as a polar vortex put the entire Midwest into a deep freeze for nearly a week, preceded and followed by snow. For a week IUN either opened late, closed early, or shut down completely. Even bowling and bridge got cancelled. “Deep freeze” can mean a state of suspended animation, which seemed appropriate given so many things coming to a crashing halt. My get together with Valparaiso University Sociology professor Mary Kate Blake was put off a week. Conditions brought to mind the brutal winters of the 1970s when I considered looking for a job in warmer climes and 1985 when to my amazement our Maple Place thermometer dipped well into the minus 20s. In 1994 our driveway had a thick coat of ice that proved virtually impossible to remove. Every snowstorm left me wondering if I could get up our hill once I left for school. Fortunately the Portage Street Department didn’t forget about us, thanks to cakes Toni baked for the drivers every Christmas. While teaching an 8:30 a.m. class, as was my routine, I sometimes called ahead and was told classes hadn’t been postponed or cancelled, only to learn otherwise upon arriving to IUN. More than once, I slept overnight on an uncomfortable couch in Tamarack Lounge due to conditions outside.
above, Paul Kaczocha's house in Miller; below, Grand Rapids, MI
It’s been colder in these parts than in Antarctica, Greenland or Siberia. The weather was even worse in western Michigan, where lake effect has been relentless. House pets are rebelling against venturing outside to relieve themselves. After Miranda posted a photo of her “snow kitten,” her mom asked if she had thrown him outside. “Nooo, placed him very gently,”cat-lover Miranda responded. When she was a kid, Miranda loved visiting Ken Applehans and his menagerie of cats and kittens that he’d taken in on various occasions. Darcey Wade complained that her kitchen smelled like urine. Predictions are for as much as a, 80-degree temperature change, as Monday’s forecast is high in the mid-50s.
Home bound, I did a final proofread of the forthcoming Steel Shavings,volume 48 with Gary jazz legend Billy Foster on the cover. In the Index were several inconsistencies regarding spelling. For instance, I had three “fs” in Pfeifer and left out the “a” in MacDonald. Moore, Powell was out of order, and Cele Morris appeared in two different spots. Coincidentally, Maria McGrath emailed that she was currently preparing an Index for “Food for Dissent,” due out in June. Mine is a Region name index. I replied: “Subject indexes are ten times harder. They’re also hard to proofread without falling asleep.”
I finished Kurt Vonnegut’s “God Blass You, Mr. Rosewater” (1965), which I had checked out from Chesterton library (also in the stacks was Vonnegut’s later “God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian”) along with Kurt Vile’s new CD “Bottle It In” and others by Oasis and Paul McCartney. Neither I nor a library staff person could find McCartney’s “All the Best,” but as I was leaving, she caught up with me to say she’d found it and checked it out for me. Nice. “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” takes place in Rosewater, Indiana, which Vonnegut claims is 42 miles from Turkey Run State Park. Science fiction writer Kilgore Trout makes an appearance, and in some ways the book is a prequel to my favorite Vonnegut novel, “Breakfast of Champions: Goodbye Blue Monday.” “God Blass You, Mr. Rosewater” has many quirky characters, whom everyone but Eliot Rosewater despises, including town drunk Delbert Peach, who goes around singing, “I’ve got the clap and the blueballs, too/ The clap don’t hurt but the blueballs do.”
In my Fifties Steel Shavings, subtitled “Relationships between the Sexes during the Teen Years of the 1950s,” which I call my R-rated issue, a section called Blue Balls includes this account by Jim Wojehowski of taking a date atop an abandoned grain elevator in Burnham, where one could see for miles and miles and get a scenic view of the Chicago skyline:
Joey and I took Peggy and Lisa through a hole in a fence up to the warehouse. We had been hyping the eerie nature of the building and tossed in a few murder stories. The girls said they weren’t scared, but when a ton of pigeons flew out as we reached the top of the staircase, the girls clung to us like we had hoped. Before long we settled in to some serious necking and petting. You could say we had as much fun as two people can have with their clothes still on. The next day I had a classic case of teen “blue balls.”
In her Ayers Realtors Newsletter column cat lover Judy Ayers wrote about her childhood neighbors in Miller, the Moseguards, and a recently deceased pet in an essay titled “Ode to Old Dude”:
There was an elderly retired couple, the Moseguards, who had an old black Ford sedan that Evelyn drove, and the car had taken quite a beating as Evelyn got older and had trouble negotiating the car and the garage door. Elmer was the passenger and wore suspenders and a funny little hat that he tipped as they drove down the alley. Evelyn wore housedresses, full frontal aprons, and a hat that matched Elmer’s. She took her driving seriously with both hands gripped on the wheel, eyes focused on the path ahead and enough force on the accelerator to make gravel fly and mothers quickly take inventory of the children when they heard the Moseguard car approaching.
Elmer and Evelyn loved cats and had a lot of them. There was always a cat or two in various windows of the house, some sat in the sun in their back yard and there was always a cat or two in Elmer’s lap when they went on driving excursions. Gene remembers the time when Elmer pounded on the Ayers’ back door, yelling and screaming about a cat in their tree and wanted Gene to come out right away and retrieve it. Elmer had a ladder in place, having already attempted to rescue the little rascal, when 11-year-old Gene was recruited. He could reach the cat, but the cat bit and/or scratched him time and time again as Elmer and Evelyn yelled from the ground and became quite surly themselves.
Twelve years ago, Gene and I were given a kitten named Dude. Over the years we had cats one at a time and were always mindful of mimicking the Moseguards. That includes making sure a draft of cat presence was never the first to greet Trick or Treaters on Halloween, and we make sure neither of us leaves the house adorned in cat hair. Even though it’s been weeks since Dude died, I still expect him to meet me at the door or come running at the sound of the can opener opening a can which in Dude’s mind could only contain tuna. As sad as it is to lose a pet, I still say there is nothing like a nonjudgmental, trusting dependable four-legged companion, and one of these days I hope we find another furry friend.
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