Gage Park everlasting

 I remember when some agents of Elsdon came knocking on our bungalow door asking for more money to build a new church.  My parents had never attended say for Christmas and I had wheedled my way out of ruining a perfectly fine Sunday morning belting out That Old Rugged Cross in uncomfortable clothes, and my sisters had mostly wheedled their way out and so they got zero from the house on Homan Avenue.  

And I remember all the talk about the neighborhood changing.  They're at the tracks!  They're at Western! They're crossing Western!  And then They never got there, the Mexicans moved in.  They weren't as threatening because they looked like us, but they didn't speak like us.  I remember my mother sort of tried to be friends with them in her flinty Bohunk way.  But outside of her flinty Bohunk ways, I think it was hard for them to speak English.  That's maybe what they had to speak at work, and who likes work?  It was much easier to speak your native tongue with your own people. and so my mother was sort of frozen out.

At that time there were also Arabs in the neighborhood, including on the other side of the house where those solid Irish neighbors, the O'Days had previously lived.  I'm sure they would have rather been speaking Arabic, but they were spread out and of course they didn't speak Spanish so English would do well enough.  They were Palestinians and they were pissed off at what had happened to them in their homeland. but although my mother had some Jewish friends she really had no knowledge of Israel and Palestine and that whole bitter ball of wax.

Oh Gage Park, so hustling, so bustling, so self-contained.  Those bungalows look as spiffy as when I walked two blocks down Homan to Enrico Tonti school, which is probably as spiffy as when they were built.  Good solid American brick will probably outlive the four horsemen.  Let's just go around this area, too much brick, streets all right angled and rigid, and those folks, they just seem too invulnerable.

And I guess that's the way I remember it from growing up there.  No reason to go north of 51st or south of the golf course, or east of western, or south of Cicero.  Well you can go south of Cicero to the airport.  Men in turbans, women in saris.  Big four propeller airplanes taking off for Cleveland, and for all over the world.  It was like a spaceport, like that bar in Star Wars when Star Wars was Captain Video and His Video Rangers.  A whole wide world out there.