Halloween

 At last.  Not that I am planning on kicking out the jams or going out trick or treating.  It's that the month of October was just too jam-packed for an old gent such as myself.  A trip to DC, a trip to Nap Town including a side trip past Columbus to Newark Ohio, cataract surgery, and the seventh or eighth annual Punkin Palooza.  

Cataract surgery was on my other eye and I was expecting to have super duper vision.  It's better than with the single super eye, but not all that much better, and now I have to carry around reading glasses wherever I go.  It was my habit before to take off my glasses when I wanted to read something, now I have to remember to put them on.  Hopefully it will become second nature over time, and while not super duper my current long vision is still more super than it was before.

The trip to DC was okay, but I am not much for monuments and the city part of DC was quite disappointing.  Indy was ok, and it was great to see a Sullivan bank restored, but it was only the exterior, still the whole town seemed to be on the rise from a fading industrial city  to more of a cheery tourist town, and a night in a motel bar where strangers from all over join together in a conversation, priceless.  

I am an early riser and I woke up at 4 AM both in DC and Columbus, and of course I had to get a newspaper.  There is nothing like walking down empty streets of a dark city you do not know at all at 4AM.  Exhilarating.  In Columbus the newspaper was in a gas station down the hill on the other side of a river over a poorly lit bridge, a good place to get mugged, but even that was a bit of a cheap thrill, the kind that I like.

The Palooza was exciting also in that my former punkin connection pulled out with only a week's advance notice.  It's not easy getting forty punkins delivered to your building, but the little store came through and everybody had a good time.

Saturday I went to the memorial of a good friend of about ten years.  He had medical problems and they got worse and his doctors seemed to be fiddle faddling around, and when he finally had surgery I was relieved.  The surgery came through more or less okay, but then he was stuck in the hospital and there were complications and then a slow slide and he never did make it back to his cozy apartment in Humboldt Park.

He was born to religious fanatics in Flint Michigan and had early success playing the French horn, but he took glory in that and not in The Lord and he got kicked out of the family.  He scrambled around, got into U Michigan, and then a year in Stockholm studying Chinese, then in Chicago driving a cab and working with some researchers, and then Burkino Faso for the Peace Corps and falling in love with a woman there and marrying her but she had a heart defect that they couldn't cure in Africa and the USA wouldn't let her in unless he had a job and health insurance and he got a job teaching school for mean nuns who he dared not piss off because if he did his wife would die.  Had a kid with her and she divorced him.  Met him when he came to my Saturday watercolor class and we both rode the Red Line back from it and got to talking, and then we saw each other regularly.  The last five years meeting at a corner bakery and exchanging opinions of shade tree philosophers deep into the day.

The memorial was a nice.  His daughter and the wife who divorced him set it all up, nice gallery, nice food, many of his art works displayed, and you are walking around thinking what an extraordinary guy and leaving with a glow and walking out in the sunset and realizing you will never see him again.

Well happy Halloween Gentlemen.

My calendar is now clean clear to Thanksgiving.