thanksgiving dinner

When we drove up from Champaign for a Cub game Wrigleyville was a Puerto Rican neighborhood, and there would be kids there who would ask for some pittance to watch our car.  I don't imagine they patrolled the streets to keep other rapscallions from doing damage, but the pittance prevented the disappointment that they otherwise might have taken out on our automobile.  Or our hubcaps.  Whatever happened to hubcap stealing.  In the old days it was widely believed that any ambitious young hoodlum could easily make enough dough to buy a motorcycle jacket from an evening of prying off hubcaps, but you never hear that anymore.  No wonder young kids of today are disillusioned.

I hate the guy in the restroom.  Mostly I hate giving him money, but I also hate the idea of somebody making a living that way.  How depressing to punch the clock and walk into the Men's Room.  And none of the guys coming in there want to discuss the weather, maybe sports, some guys will talk sports at the drop of a hat, but pretty much nobody wants you there.  I guess hotels and fancy restaurants thought it was somehow classy, because guys hated to reach for a towel to dry their hands or whatever.  Thank god you hardly ever see them anymore.  I think women still have them, but women's bathrooms are like ballrooms I hear where they have some little party among themselves before returning to their dour men.  Damn there was an Erma Bombeck column on the subject which I cannot find.

My sister's having some wood floors put in and the wood has to breathe or something so we won't be having Thanksgiving at her house.  It will be at Harry Carey's,  When it first opened it had guys in the restroom, but once I found that out, I would just slip out around the corner to where I lived when I wanted to go.  Now that Beagles and I have been accounted for where will Old Dog be eating those sweet potatoes with the little marshmallows melted over them?


Perhaps I shouldn't put the onus on the whole state of Alabama, but geez, what do you say about a whole state who voted for this guy in the primary and likely (though increasingly less) will vote him in?  That old time religion, bad enough when the church on the corner is rocking with talking in tongues and snakes, but when everybody on your block is doing the same, well, I couldn't live like that.

I sometimes wander down to the mall hoping the teen girls there will play me like a dime store fiddle (a dime store fiddle?), but I guess they think I am too sharp for that.