Ash Wednesday

 Is just another day to me.  I step out and go about my business.  I go here and there and do this and that, but suddenly I come across somebody with a dirty forehead, then another, and another.  Oh I guess this must be Ash Wednesday.

Well those Catholics, they do have their things don't they?  Growing up a prot in Chicago is like being a stranger in a strange land.  Half the crew that gathers for games on those long summer evenings go to Catholic School, a dark place where kids get beaten up by nuns and have tons of homework to do.  And then there was one afternoon a week when all the Catholic kids in the public school (about half of us) were released to go to the church for some kind of religious thing.  Lucky them you might think, but actually they had to do some kind of study while we prots brought in board and card games and idled the day away.

I left the hood maybe in the mid sixties and didn't come back until twenty years later, and I had to get back into all this Chicago stuff like no mustard on hot dogs and one of them was paczkis.  Gage Park was one third Irish and one third Polish, and one third everybody else who was white, so it was very Catholic, but I never remember hearing about paczkis.  But apparently they are a big Chicago thing.

Well okay, they are tasty enough.  I got some maybe three years ago and their were too many in the box so I left some outside my neighbor's door.  She grew up in the boot heel of Missouri and one day somebody came back from a visit and told her about this wondrous city of Chicago, and as soon as she was of age she flew north and has lived here all the rest of her life so I  guess she is more Chicago than I am, and she was delighted to have paczkis right outside her door.

So I got her some last year, and yesterday I set out after the big snowstorm to the Jewel to get some for the two of us.  

And I was disgusted.  Growing up in Gage Park one of our big Chicago things was that everybody shoveled their walk.  If you couldn't or didn't want to, likely your neighbor would do it for you and there were plenty of kids like me with shovels and an open hand who were more than eager to do the job.  Shoveling the whole sidewalk was the usual thing, but if you just did a shovel-wide that people could squeeze through that was okay, but if you didn't do anything at all (which was rare, maybe one per block) the whole neighborhood frowned upon you.

When I lived in Urbana, even though I rented, I owned a snow shovel and I was out there with the drop of the snowflake, and there was a vacant lot next door so I did that too, because, you know, it was the thing to do.  It was what good citizens do.  When I moved back to Chicago and was living in my parents' attic I was out there with every snow, proud to be a real Chicagoan.

But yesterday, here in the very heart of Chicago half the walks were not shoveled at all, many of them have not been shoveled all winter.  I was disgusted.

There is this social media thing, NextDoor which is neighborhood centric and mostly people use it to sell that old chair or coat or whatever but sometimes people use it to make some statement about the hood or whatever.  I went right to it and made a blistering post about how we should boycott stores who don't shovel their sidewalk.  I included the detail about the paczkis to show them that I was a real Chicagoan, just like them.  

I sat back to wait for the expected Right On Brother responses, and instead I got blistered.  All these stores that are just getting by run by crippled old ladies who can't handle a shovel or afford to pay anybody to do it for them, and I am trying to run them out of business.  I got called a Karen and a cancel culture guy and a fat slob seeking sweet pastries and on and on.  Posts were running four out of five against me.  It was a pile on.

You know I read those things about cyber bullying and I have previously thought oh c'mon, it's just words on a computer, who cares.  But I have to tell you it did not feel good.  I made one half-hearted attempt at justification, but that just attracted more insults, and finally I just stopped looking at it.

I was going to add a link to it so that the dogs could see how unfairly I had been treated but this morning I see that the whole thing has been taken down, I assume the people who run it wanted to hide the seamy side of the internet.  

Well that was Fat Tuesday as all good Catholics know, which precedes Lent when all our Catholic neighbors had to give something up while we prots could just act like we always did, because we were all going to hell anyway.  But for now it is Ash Wednesday and I ate two of my paczkis yesterday and will eat the other two today because I am a fat slob who seeks sweet pastries, and a real Chicagoan.