7-11s and finches

I remember the butcher shops, seems like their used to be a lot of them.  My mother always went to one on 55th Street and Spaulding because she thought they had better meat than the High Low.

We have a lot of 7-11s in the city.  I'm sure I told you about how when the first 7-11 opened up at 54th and Kedzie how thrilled I was.  Imagine a store that would open at seven in the morning and not close until eleven at night!

There is a neighborhood southwest of downtown, around 18th and Ashland called Pilsen after the town in Bohemia, and is where all us Czechs used to live.  My mother was born there, and now it is where the Mexicans live.  Well it is where the Mexicans first come when they cross the border. They live there maybe a couple years, working hard and saving money and then they move further southwest, into Gage Park, and then to Berwyn and then deeper into the burbs just as our forebears have done.

The thing about it is that Pilsen, having this transient population, nobody builds new condos, and the 7-11s and McDonalds don't move in, maybe because the locals work harder and cheaper in their own little stores and restaurants, so going back there is a little like going back to the 50s.  Everything is Mom and Pop.  I imagine those convenience stores are mighty convenient, but they just don't have that smell, those old wooden floors and the scent of years and years of groceries and little kids, their heads barely over the counter pointing at cheap candy displayed behind the kindly (but penny pinching) old grocer.

There is one place still in Gage Park, on 55th just west of St Galls, The Cupboard, which is kind of a convenience store which doesn't appear to be part of a chain.  And you know how the old neighborhood was always rather prudish, but you push past the doors of the Cupboard, and there are lottery tickets, cigarettes, booze, dirty magazines.  It's like Satan's Little Portal down the street from the church.

Along the interstates when Debbie and I are going on our trips the convenience stores are ubiquitous, we stop for gas and get a soda and take a leak, we call them Pop and Pees.

Speaking of gas, I'm glad I don't know much about that.  I last had a car in 1971, and back then they did put in the gas and clean the windshield and sometimes make a little chitchat about the roads or the weather or whatever.  It was nice.  Anymore I don't even know how to put gas in a car with credit card and the buttons and that hose thing.  I'm pretty sure I could figure it out, but Debbie never lets me, so I sit there like I don't have a thought in my pretty little head while she does the card and the buttons and hose thing, and usually with my credit card.  Kind of emasculating.

I certainly don't have a need for a tractor, but I have been getting a little wildlife action this spring.  A pair of finches that used to come by last year and snatch the string that held up last year's tomatoes for their nest and peck out some seeds from last year's sunflowers, and some morning glory seeds from the floor of the balcony, have returned.

There is the matter of the cats.  They do that chattering thing, and they look very interested, but they don't have that killer instinct like my previous cat, Annie, had.  I have long heard that if Mom doesn't show the kids how to hunt they never pick up the habit. and I think it may be true.  The other day both the birds and the cats were on the balcony without either one paying much attention to the other.  So I went out and bought a millet sock, and tied it up to the railing, and at first they paid it no mind, but the day before yesterday they found it and pecked the hell out of it.

Then yesterday they came back with a third finch, friend, neighbor, how does that work?  Anyway when the third finch started pecking they both tried to chase him away, or I think that is what was going on.  Who can tell one finch from another?