Kind of a nothing day but an evening of nostalgia

 

The Madison Park Apartments
Hyde Park Boulevard at Dorchester Avenue
Chicago

All work and no play, they say, makes you dull. Sort of how I feel today. I read emails, caught up on odds and ends, did a bit on the novel but not a lot, and the day just sort off went by. Jacob and Jordan were up at five this morning so that he could be at Farrington Field by six to go to a golf tournament. He came home and went right back to bed. Christian had an event tonight, so there Jordan and I were staring at each other. “What’s for dinner?” She has mapped out meals from now until Thanksgiving and we’ve done grocery lists—so organized. Only there was no plan for tonight.

She had said a big green salad with chicken, so as she came and went between the cottage and the house I thought surely she’d start to make a salad any minute. Finally, when she came in around seven, I said, “Starving.” (I confess for once I’d been enjoying not cooking.) Then it came out that she was not at all hungry, and Jacob had gone back to bed—they have to repeat the five o’cock thing tomorrow. She was full of apologies, said to eat the chicken, but by then I just wanted something quick and easy. So for the second night this week, I had scrambled eggs. And a bit of last night’s German potato salad.

So there I was, after a nothing day, looking at a nothing evening. But I began a little research for the current Irene novel. If Henny and Patrick are now happily married, they need to move out of two, small but adjacent apartments. I wanted to give them an old cottage in Hyde Park, but the more I looked, the scarcer cottages were and the higher real estate. It’s not at all uncommon for a modest house to be a million and up. Henny and Patrick can’t afford that. So I prowled around and gathered enough information to invent a house for them. I’m rather captivated by it

Built in the twenties, it’s a tall and skinny wood frame structure, with bay windows downstairs and up, dark, natural woodwork and wainscoting, hardwood floors, and pocket doors. Somebody kept all the good features of an older home—it’s hard to find original wainscoting these days. The kitchen however was maybe updated in the fifties, certainly not suited for a chef on the brink of her career. They have a lot of renovation to do, bit by bit.

This is sort of like playing with paper dolls when you were a kid. You get to make up houses, clothing, food, all aspects of life. A lot of fun. It occurs to me that traditionally the main character in a cozy is a single woman, in her twenties or thirties a the most, often with a love/hate romantic entanglement, though those parameters are branching out all the time. Still, I seem to keep marrying off my protagonists. So far, I’ve sustained series with married couples, and I’m counting on it to be true with Henny and Patrick. As she says early on, they are deliriously happily married.

Of course, Irene will be returning from France, this time drawn back by a murder. This time she announces that since she visits so often, she is thinking of taking a small apartment in a residential hotel. (No need to dwell on Henny’s reaction to that.) So I went back online to check residential hotels—and there are none under that classification. I guess I was thinking of the grand old hotels of my youth, where aging widows and spinsters lived and took their meals in quietly elegant dining rooms. The woman I worked for, as a gofer/typist, when I was I high school used to take me to such hotels for lunch. Once, wanting me to impress someone we were with, she suggested I have the calavo pear with tuna salad. I replied that I would if it were avocado, but I didn’t much like pears. She kicked me under the table. How was I to know calavo was another name for avocado? At any rate, those hotels are gone.

On an impulse I searched for the Madison Park Hotel—I grew up in Madison Park—and lo! It’s still there, in all its grand glory, but now called the Madison Park Apartments. No restaurant, but a breakfast bar and they’ve gotten modern with an exercise facility. The blurb says it still has its grandly luxurious lobby and all the amenities. I guess that’s where Irene will land.

Such fun to wander around my old neighborhood, even if only online. And fun to play with paper dolls.

Have a good sleep, everyone.

Texas, Chicago, and Me

 

The house of my growing years

Last night I was reading the opening of Jacqueline Winspear’s memoir, This Time Next Year We’ll Be Laughing, when I came across the passage where she talks of the land of our growing and how it is filled with meaning for each of us. Place, she writes, gives our lives meaning. For me, the place of my growing was Chicago, and for many years I thought I’d put it behind me. After all, I reasoned, everyone I knew there had either left or died. But it turns out I had not put it away from me.

I have lived in Texas fifty-six years, long enough I always feel to be considered a native. My careers as author and publisher have been inextricably entwined with Texas, and yet real Texas natives, those born on the soil, have not-so-subtle ways of reminding one that you are an outsider. In the seventies, there was a Born in Texas movement. You could sign up at booths in shopping malls and, for a fee, get a certificate and a T-shirt. While registering my four children, I felt a pang of jealousy. And there were other T-shirts that said, “I wasn’t born in Texas, but I got here as soon as I could.” Folklorist and award-winning author Joyce Gibson Roach and I used to do a dog-and-pony show where she talked about how being a fifth-generation Texan impacted her work, and I followed with “Notes from a Newcomer.” I wish today I had those notes, but they are buried in an archive somewhere.

Aside from fleeting thoughts, Chicago only came into my consciousness a few years ago. After five or more years writing and rewriting, I published a longish historical novel, The Gilded Cage, about Cissie Palmer (wife of hotelier Potter Palmer) who was one of if not the first woman to combine great wealth with philanthropy. The subject came to me first as an assignment for a children’s book. As I wrote, Chicago’s colorful history of the late nineteenth century came tumbling back into my mind—the Great Fire, the Civil War, the Haymarket Riot, Marshall Field and his store, the stockyards and the meat packers, Pullmantown, and, of course, the Columbian Exposition. I was wrapped again in my love for and familiarity with Chicago’s South Side.

And then, in 2016, my four grown children and I spent several days in the city so that I could show them where I grew up. Their reaction filled my heart with love—they exclaimed over my childhood home (sort of a red-brick brownstone that they, expecting poverty, estimated at over a million in worth), the elegant nineteenth-century houses of Hyde Park, the gray grandeur of Rockefeller Chapel and the other buildings of the University of Chicago. We dined at Berghoff’s and Rick Steves’ La Fontera, took the historical tour of the Palmer House, stayed in a suite overlooking Lake Michigan and the North Shore—I could gaze at the lake and fill something inside me that had too long missed that lake. It was, though short, perhaps the most memorable trip of my life.

In 2019, some unknown spark prompted me to move beyond Texas and write about Chicago in an entirely different vein—a contemporary cozy mystery set in Hyde Park, the neighborhood of my growing. And now I am, slowly, working on a sequel to Saving Irene, to be titled Irene in Danger. And I know, though a Texan most of the time, a part of me never left Chicago, and I carry that magnificent city in my heart.

Maybe Winspear’s insight will spur me to get serious about that memoir that I keep in the back of my mind. “Memories,” she wrote, “appear in flashes of light,” and I think that is what my memoir would be—not a connected, continuous narrative, but flashes of memory as they came to me.

You really can’t go home again

Friend Jean told me that the newspaper had a feature on the Indiana Dunes and she thought that was where my family and I spent summers. It was, and I was excited about seeing the article, anticipating memory-evoking prose and maybe some familiar scenes. She brought me the article when we had supper at Tokyo Café tonight, and I could hardly wait to get home to read it.

A major disappointment. At first glance, I thought it wonderful that the Dunes had been upgraded to national park status, but reading further on I realized that the national park is a much larger swath of land that encompasses the smaller Indiana Dunes State Park of my memory. A major highway cuts through the national park which also encompasses such surrounding towns as Chesterton, Valparaiso, and Beverly Shores—all familiar names from my day but surely not part of the park. Tours suggest staying in those towns, down to what B&Bs and restaurants are recommended.

In my day, some sixty-plus years ago, there were two entries to the park—the beach, which featured a pavilion—we called it The Pavilion—which was always to my mind crowded and dirty. People were not careful with their bathroom habits, their food, and their trash. To get to our secluded cabin by the beach, we would have had to pick our way through crowds of beach bathers (I have less attractive names for them) and then walk a mile down the beach, in the hot sun, carrying whatever we needed. My family much preferred the woods.

We would park in a small parking lot with a canteen that was sometimes open, sometimes not. Then out came the duffel bags and backpacks because we had to carry clothes, groceries, books, whatever we needed, and we headed into the woods. I can almost follow the route and the various trails in my memory, though surely if I were there today, I’d be lost. Usually we went in the daytime, but I remember one night when Dad stopped all of us on the trail to let a skunk pass. A mile of up and down on sandy trails, watching for poison ivy, and we were home, home being a small cabin with no running water (a cistern pump), no electricity, and an outhouse. We thought we were uptown when we got bottled gas for cooking and a real refrigerator.

The back of our cabin looked out over the serene woods, while the front, high up on a dune, offered a spectacular view of Lake Michigan. The cabin sat literally at the southernmost tip of the vast lake, and it was where I learned to love storms, watching them roll down the length of the lake from the north.

I got no sense of that long lost world from the article, which seemed written for the tourist who wants to drive, in comfort, from one B&B to the next one, with a nod to those who want to hike. A two-mile trail takes in the Bailly homestead, site of early settlers to the area. It was definitely not in the park I knew.

My dad and a friend owned the cabin as bachelor physicians, and we continued to share it with that other family all the years I remember. Sometime along the way the State of Indiana exercised it eminent domain rights and took over the cabins, leasing them back to previous owners every year. It was always a waiting game—would the lease arrive this year? In 1969, the year my folks retired and moved to North Carolina, the lease was cancelled. The state rented the cabins as weekend getaways for a few years and then burned them all.

I don’t think I could bear to go back and see the spot where our cabin stood, though the way dunes shift and change the landscape, I probably couldn’t even find it. But I often go back in my mind. I had a favorite spot, halfway down the dune to the beach, on a path to friends’ cabin. There was a little outcropping, and at sunset I could sit there, my arm around Timmy, our collie mix, and watch the sun set behind the skyscrapers of Chicago, some forty miles across the lake. The sun would be a huge red ball and the skyscrapers, tiny black dots in front of it. Sitting there, in my mind these days, I am in my safe spot.

I guess maybe memories are better than today’s reality.

My tranquil spot

   

They say everyone should have a safe spot in their mind where they can go, mentally, to find peace, tranquility, respite from daily confusions. For many years, mine was a small outcropping on a dune above Lake Michigan in the Indiana Dunes State Park. My family had a cottage higher up on the dune, and we spent many happy summer days and nights there. I remember going to “my spot” with our dog, a wild collie mix, a female inappropriately named Timmy. She loved to roll her shoulders in the dead fish on the beach, but when I called her to my spot, she would come obediently and sit quietly by my side. From that spot, I could watch the sun set behind the distant skyscrapers of Chicago. On a good night, the sun would be an orange ball, and the skyscrapers but tiny black dots against it.

I won’t pretend that I meditated or thought deep thoughts when I sat there at the age of seven or eight, but I do know as an adult, when troubled, I would close my eyes and imagine myself in that spot, with Timmy, watching the sun set. It was soothing and somehow made me feel better. Sometimes, but not always, it helped me think clearly about whatever was troubling me.

In the last couple of years, that dunes perch has given way in my mind to a new spot: sitting in rocker on the shore of the tiny lake in Tomball where that branch of my family—Colin, Lisa, Morgan, Kegan, and Grace the dog—live. When I visit in the summer, we take glasses of wine down there at sunset and sit to enjoy the encroaching dark, despite mosquitoes and flies and gnats. The water is always calm, though an occasional fish breaks the surface.

There’s no swimming in the lake—snakes and pollution from the stables next door prevent that, so the family swims in a pool. But my grandsons have fished from the bank with more enthusiasm than results, and occasionally some venture out in a canoe.

This Christmas visit I had not been down to the lake in five days—we’ve been too busy, and the evenings have been too chilly. But today, about four, Colin helped me down the stairs and brought a glass of wine. The lake was absolutely still, its surface like glass, and the temperature was neither too warm nor too chilly. I could stare at the lake and see a tiny house on the not-too-distant shore and another house, closer, on the side of Colin’s property. In the far distance I could see—and barely hear—cars on Highway 2920.  I soaked up tranquility. Not sure I’m a better person for it, but I am a happier camper.

Tomorrow I go back to Fort Worth, but I am already looking forward to a summer visit. And until then, I have my safe spot in my mind.

Have you done your homework yet?

Jacob told me on Tuesday that he had a project due on Friday. He handed me a tiny piece of paper on which he'd written Jacob Burton/Tiger Woods. "I have to do a budget, and I chose Tiger Woods because he's a great golfer." Okay. "Do you know what a budget is?" "No." So I tried to explain, but it's kind of hard to do in Tiger Woods' terms--where do you start? $10 million? More? Less? I figured he'd take it home to his parents.
Next day, he was frantic. "Where's that piece of paper?" He looked through the loose papers on my desk--they are many--and found it but then last night it was still on my desk. Meanwhile late last night he told his folks he had a project due Friday but they had no inkling about it. I talked, separately, to two concerned, even frantic, parents today. All ended well. I could tell Jacob didn't understand what he was talking about, but he did say that the class would go to the library tomorrow and find information about their subjects. All well and good--no project due. What he missed was that they'd work on the project Friday.
When he comes to my house in the afternoon, we spend a minimum of an hour and twenty minutes on homework--sometimes we finish most of it, sometimes we barely make a dent. He goes home to do his reading and reading comprehension (the latter is a problem) and finish whatever we didn't get done. Then it's dinner, bath and bed. If it's a baseball day, the schedule gets all out of whack.
I finally confessed to Jordan something that's been bothering me for a long time: I don't remember doing homework with my kids. "You didn't," she said, "We didn't bring any home. We did it all in the classroom. When we got out of school, we played with friends. Then it was dinner, bath, and bed."
Whew! I wasn't a bad parent. But where's Jacob's play time? If he wants to play with a friend after school any day but Friday, I have to say no. We have homework to do.
I wonder what all this is doing for him. Today we were adding two two-figure sums. He did it the way he's taught in school--you add the "tens" and then the extra numbers. To check, I scribbled it on a piece of paper the way I've always done it--and came out with a figure ten higher than his. He insisted he was right; when he finally redid it, he said, "You're right."
I'm not sure the Texas gubernatorial debate about how much we spend on each child really addresses this problem. Yes, we ought to pay teachers better and fund our schools better, but will that fix the curriculum? I need teacher opinions.
Meanwhile I'm struggling through third grade and Jacob's sometimes struggling through his childhood, which should be a happy time.