Different Crowds

You said something before about running with the crowd. The thing is, there are lots of crowds, or cliques, or societies, or sub cultures in the world, and they all think that they're the only one. Like I said, I had plenty of friends, just different friends than you had. They weren't all hunters and fishermen either. There were the kids at school, at Elsdon, at Musichorale (the choir that my mom was in and that she persuaded me to join for a year, against my better judgment), and the kids on the block. The only person I remember who showed any interest in sports was my next door neighbor Jimmy. He was the one who got me to watching the White Sox games that one summer. It was interesting at first, but I soon tired of it, and of Jimmy, who had a few other personality traits that I grew to dislike. Some of the kids at school were into sports, but they were just acquaintances, not really friends. My parents were not into sports, and I don't think most of their friends were either.

There was some overlap between the groups with which I associated, both of people and of interests. One thing that most of us had in common was singing, not so much in high school, but we were always singing in elementary school, church, scouts, and Musichorale. Even the Outdoorsmen used to sing some ribald sea shanties that we learned from a record one of the guys had picked up somewhere. We used to sing some silly chants in the army while marching, and those Irish guys we trained with used to sing while drinking in the Quonset hut after duty hours. It always puzzled me why my colleagues in the paper mill thought me odd when I would break into song at work. Where I came from, you were odd if you didn't sing. It's not surprising, then, that you and I lived within a mile of each other and you never got into singing and I never got into sports. We just ran with different crowds.

Oren's farm was located a mile or two north of Kankakee. I forget the highway number, but you could get there by heading south on either Cicero or Pulaski. Later they opened an interstate, I believe it was 54, that brought us to Oren's back forty, where we could pick up a tractor trail that crossed the property to the front part. That trail was only usable in the summer, which I discovered when I tried to use it early one spring, got stuck, and ruined the clutch in my daddy's car......again.

Some years ago, Oren's granddaughter, who had not been born yet when I used to go there, contacted me on the internet. She had Googled Oren's name and came across a quote of his that I had previously used in a blog. She asked me what I remembered about her grandfather, and I ended up writing a whole series of blogs about my experiences on Oren's farm. She never did tell me much from her side of it, and I got the impression that she had not known him very well. I should have saved those blogs to my files, but I didn't, and they were lost when the site I was using shut down a year or so later. Writing those blogs was a real trip down Memory Lane for me. I hadn't thought about it for a long time, but recalling those days made me realize that working on that farm had a lot to do with making me the person that I am today. It was a privilege for this city kid, who wanted to be a farmer when he grew up, to get out of Chicago periodically and do something real. Too bad I never grew up.

The quote: "Show me a man who has a hundred ideas, and I'll show you a man who has at least one good idea. Show me a man who has only one idea, and it's probably wrong."