what goes around….

When I first retired, I began writing a story about an apartment building we owned in the nineteen eighties and nineties. The building was on Talbott Street in the run down Herron Morton Historic district of Indianapolis. It was not a big place; there were only four one bedroom apartments but over the ten years or so that we owned it, we met dozens of interesting people with those ‘naked city’ stories we used to watch. Our experiences with this place would make an epic Novel if someone like Hemingway, Updike, Stephen King or even Mickey Spillane had experienced those ten years but unfortunately, there’s only me. I wrote lots of words on the subject but finally set it aside when I decided to write ‘Travels with Susie’, a subject I was much more comfortable with. The Talbott Street story just sort of disappeared over the last five or so years.  

After the publication of ‘Good Times and Bad’, a book similar to my first one, I became interested in Talbott Street again. I am not a Fiction writer, I’m more of a journaler and I considered using this style of storytelling to write a non-fiction or at least, a creative non-fiction book about Talbott Street but I keep drifting back to fiction writing because it would be better written with the characters being drawn from several composites of the folks involved as well as a few characters who have inhabited my head for a long time.

I hoped to use a  good part of the three days we are spending in Tennessee devoted to resurrecting what I have written thus far and  trying to make some progress into the story I want the book to tell. With alll the things in my head, I could see it easily running a couple of thousand pages and that just wouldn’t do. 

So this morning, I am beginning to involve myself once more with Mammadou and the evil spirits infecting his privates, Norma Taylor, Avenel Prichard, her son, Ken,  Jimmy Ray Osborne and a host of others including Victor Colvin of the bowl haircut and enormous Penis fame. 

 I’ll keep you posted on this.

In the meantime, another short story.

Back home in 1950’s and sixties Loogootee, Indiana, when serving informal meals, we would sometimes prepare our plates from the food on the stove rather than dirty a bunch of serving bowls. My mother, using the practical vernacular of the day, would call this practice ‘dipping up’.    

Susie, being a big city girl and a lady who wanted all of her meals to be less informal, could never understand the term and refused to use it. Over the years, I became  used to sitting down with the family and having food servied from bowls at the dinner table. It is a much more civilized and leisurely way of having dinner.

This morning, we’re here in the mountains of Gatlingburg, Tennessee on a little short vacation.  

Susie made us a scrumptious breakfast of biscuits and gravy.

“I’ll set the table.” I volunteered, reaching for the pan of biscuits. 

“Nope.” Susie said. “We’re not going to all that trouble. This morning we’re dipping up.”   I imagine my mom, somewhere up there in the heavenly bodies, smiled at that pronouncement.

What got into Susie?  I don’t know. Maybe it’s this mountain air.

Incidentally, Victor Colvin and his assets are not based on me or anyone I know. He is an entirely made up person.

A funny feeling.

During our travels of the last eight years, we have met many people who questioned the wisdom of our lifestyle because of the possiblility of suffering some  medical problem in an out of the way location.  I never really understood that reasoning because there are doctors and hospitals just about everywhere but to each his own has been my mantra in this position.

For the next three days, we  are currently ensconsed in a three story cabin on the side of a mountain outside of Gatlinburg, Tennessee.  Along with maybe a hundred of these modern, fancy cabins, we are surrounded by stereotypical hillbilly homes and run down house trailers.

we're down the hill on the right.

I’m sure there are medical facilities somewhere but I don’t know where or how far.

I half expect to see a young Loretta Lynn down in those hollers except for one thing, she's from Butcher Holler, Kentucky..

What with my recently fixed bypass surgery, the soon to be fixed blockages in the veins of my legs and the hopefully fixable atrial fibrillation in my heartbeat, it occurred to me this morning that I’m in a bad spot if a medical emergency should arise.

It’s doesn’t really have me at the worrying stage yet but I can see that could happen if I don’t resist it. That Indianapolis Condo ten minutes from St. Francis Hospital looks better all the time.

But I don’t want to be tethered to that place so this funny feeling in the back of my head will just have to go away.

In an instant….

Susie, our son, Jason and I are in Gatlinburg, Tn  with our daughter, Julie, and her family. We made the drive in two cars yesterday, a miserable day, weatherwise.  It was rainy, cold and very windy, just one of those days when you’d like to be curled up with a good book. 

Rick, Julie and our granddaughter made their way down here via I-65 through Louisville while we went through Cincinnati on I-74. I consider that 100 miles between Indy and Louisville to be about the most boring drive in the world, topped off only by the I-70 trip from Indy to Richmond on the Ohio border. Anytime I can get south by some other route, I take it.

Somewhere south of Cincinnati and north of Lexington, we were driving in moderately heavy traffic in a steady rain. Up ahead, a few hundred yards or so, A pick up truck pullling a two axle storage trailer suddenly shot right across two lanes of traffic and bounced down the side of a steep hillside. It was such a clean, instant move that my initial thought was that he’d done it on purpose, deciding to leave the interstate for some unseen country road located at the bottom of the hundred foot hill.

But when probably twenty vehicles slammed on their brakes and headed for all four shoulders  on the six lanes of I-75, I knew I’d just witnessed a crash. 

I cannot emphasize how quickly it happened, not that it matters. By the time we passed the site, I was more shocked by the number of people who were stopping to either help or more likely, just do a little rubbernecking.   A family in a Ford expedition came across three lanes of traffic, narrowly missing the front of our car, and skidded to a stop on the shoulder. 

In the rear view mirror, I watched as a lady with a camera jumped out of the passenger side and  started taking pictures.  Jason, who was in the passenger seat, said that a man was climbing out of the truck, which was resting against a tree but appeared to be undamaged.

It occurred to me that there was more chance of harm  generated by the maneuvering vehicles than there was by the crash itself. All I wanted to do was get out of the way so we kept going. There’s probably a moral in there somewhere about people’s desire to witness a disaster but I haven’t been able to verbalize it.

I will say I no longer wonder why anyone would watch Jerry Springer.

A look at the city’s newest monument to excess.

Indianapolis is hosting The NCAA regional championships this week in the new Lucas Oil stadium. The practices for the participating teams in the tournament were open to the public and the best part of this was that it was free.

Coincidentally, my brother, one of the world’s great basketball fans, blew into town with his wife on their way to Loogootee and points south.  What with me being the philanthropic Icon that I am, I offered to host a visit to the new stadium.

I had not yet been in the place, what with it’s opening coinciding with the downward spiral of both my personal and the nation’s economy, so I leaped at the chance to go.

The building, as you probably already know, is enormous. It dominates the downtown landscape. No, dominates isn’t strong enough. it overwhelms it  and I can’t help but wonder if the architects took this into consideration when the planning began. 

There were maybe a thousand people in there but they looked lost in this gargantuan structure.  Being somewhat of a curmudgeon, I was not in favor of building this thing, but still I couldn’t help being impressed with it’s size. It’s not a good place to watch basketball but as the Indianapolis Star said this morning “That’s what the Jumbotron is for.”

A new rite of spring.

Yesterday was a nice day with no rain predicted for a few more days so Susie decided this would be a good time to spray our fruit trees with Dormant oil. This is an ongoing effort to keep the worms and fungi out of the apples, pears, cherries, plums and peaches.

It is a hopeless task with the apples. We have battled apple worms for ten years without any success. The only thing that’s going to keep worms out of those Red Delicious and Granny Smith blossoms is for me to cut down the trees , a task that is on my list of things to do this summer.

I doubt that all you Johnny Appleseed fans have much to worry about, however. My list is very long, including such items as recoating the blacktop driveway, building Riley Marie a play house, spending three weeks in Loogootee organizing the great American Novel I’m going to write someday, enclosing the porch on the barn and waxing the car, the truck and Fionna.

If you’re just visiting, Fionna is not a girl who needs a wax job, she’s our Holiday Rambler fifth wheel that we make our home in for several months of the year.

We also started what I hope is a new tradition this year, digging fishing worms. Riley Marie had the idea to gather up some worms for a spring break trip in case we go fishing.  She soon discovered that my vegetable garden was the mother lode for worms.

Grandpa, would you come help me??

 I suppose I’ll be helping her until she’s doubled in size. The dirt was nice and loose but her forty two pounds wouldn’t get that pitchfork in the ground. We didn’t have to dig far at all before we were pulling them out like radishes.

Oh Grandma, come see what I've got.

 

Riley, at age seven, is doing something that Susie, some sixty years older, wouldn’t do if you paid her a hundred dollars and that is holding a fishing worm.  Susie avoids worms like the plague and it didn’t take long for her granddaughter to find that out. 

Another game to play.

depressing doesn’t begin to describe it.

Susie and I ventured out a couple of nights ago and went to the ‘cheap’  movie theatre to see ‘Revolutionary Road’ with Kate Winslet and Leonardo what’s his name. 

I don’t know if you have seen this movie but if not, don’t go looking to see an updated version of Mary Poppins or anything.  I won’t tell you about it although it has been out for so long that Susie and I are likely the last two people in the country to see it.

 I sometimes worry that Susie and argue to much but I probably won’t be doing that anymore.  That movie makes us look like the Cleaver family.

A budding career.

After I retired, I briefly considered going into politics when a fellow from Mooresville asked me if I would be interested in running for a county office.  I quickly realized that I would not be a good fit because for the most part, I’ve always been a little suspect of politicians. I realize there are a few of them that are there to serve their fellow man but your average politician, in my view, is just looking out for themselves.

I realize that opinion is born of a small town guy’s natural distrust of anyone who spends most of their life calling attention to themselves. I  also understand that this might be a biased view because I’m not as well informed as I should be about worldly subjects.

I decided to try and remedy that recently when I got an E-mail from the Indiana Chapter of the AARP. They were looking for volunteers to spend the day lobbying our legislators on some home health issues.  That soundeed like something I needed to do.

I volunteered and spent a morning being educated on the subject and on the 2 legislators that represented the district in which I lived, one in the house and 1 in the senate. Lunch was provided and members of the legislature were invited. I sat at a table with 3 other volunteers and two members of the House of representatives. One of them was newly elected while the other had been in the house for over a decade.

I talked to them about the Home Health care issue and they both were in favor of what we were advocating but neither had any say on the details but planned to vote for it should it come to a vote.  After Lunch, I walked with the others to the Statehouse.

In the afternoon, I talked with both of my legislators. Neither were very receptive to listening to me although one of them was at least polite about it. The other was not. I got the impression that they were going to back the issue that we wanted them to but again, they had little authority in the mattter. 

It was an interesting day, this exercise in democracy, but I don’t think it made me anymore of an expert on politics than what I already was.

I don’t know if I should be indignant….

or what. Stories like this just make me sad.  I was going to write something about the country’s lost moral compass and the why and how it got lost but it’s too big for me.  I also don’t think I have the right or the knowledge to pontificate about the problem.   

All I know for sure is that Athletics, from little league to professional sports, needs an overhaul but I don’t know who’s going to do it.

A trip down Memory lane.

A couple of days ago Susie and I went on a cross town trip to a used furniture store looking for a bargain. Any bargain. We are in need of tables; end tables, coffee table, bed side tables and a dining room table for our new home. We have all of those but we brought them from the barn apartment last winter and they are not really suitable for formal living, which we do a lot of when we’re not attending the WWF events.
Also, the weather is beginning to get nice so we are thinking about spending a lot of time in Mooresville this summer and we could use those tables out there.

The furniture store was on Tenth street on Indy’s east side where I began my quest to be an avant-garde, suave and debonair big city feller.  It was sort of wasted trip because there was not much in the way of tables at the store.

“Come back tomorrow.” The tobacco chewing owner told me, letting fly with a big wad toward  the wastebasket next to his desk. He got real close, the wad sliding slowly down the outside of the pale gray container. “We get new stock everyday.”

On our way to tenth street,  I had driven by the old RCA television plant at the corner of Michigan and LaSalle street where my brother worked for a while. I had worked at RCA’s magnetic tape plant on east 30th but spent some time on LaSalle Street where RCA’s family store was located. Employees could find bargains in elctronics there and I was always on the lookout for a real steal.

That old, closed and partially abandoned RCA plant had prompted all kinds of memories so we left the furniture store and headed east towards 5130 East Michigan. The house at that address contained four apartments and in the early 1960’s, the eastern  upstairs unit had been rented by Larry Strange, my brother’s classmate and friend to both of us.

The place was the scene of a couple of life altering events for me. I came to Indianpolis from Loogootee one fridav night in March of 1963. With a nervous, shaky hand and using Larry’s phone, I called Susie to talk to her alone for the first time.  

A couple of weeks later, I returned to the apartment with my cousin, Tony Summers in tow. We were preparing to leave Loogootee to seek our fortune in California but in truth, I was scared to death of such an idea and saw no way that I could ever really pick up and leave Loogootee. None the less, I went along with the plans, more afraid of backing out than I was of leaving home. 

My second life altering event occurred that weekend when I called Susie and asked her for a date. She accepted and we made plans to go go to the downtown Lyric theatre on Illinois street to see ‘Lawrence of Arabia.’  That date was the impetus I needed to tell Tony that I didn’t want to go. All my big talk about California was just that; big talk.

“I knew you wouldn’t go.” he said “And I especially knew you wouldn’t go when you met Susie.” 

“You’re right. I can’t do it.” I told him, finally facing the fact that I had never really wanted to go.

A few weeks later, Tony went to California where he remained for the next thirty or so years, becoming a world traveler and a very successful geologist who worked for San Francisco’s Golden Gate museum. He died at age fifty three, never once regretting (at least to me) his move.

 I remained behind and married Susie about  a year later. Two weeks after we tied the knot, Larry Strange died after a months long struggle with cancer. He had been to sick to make the ceremony.

Marriage suited me just fine.  I was a pretty happy fellow but still, every once in a while, especially after a bad day at work or an argument with Susie, I would longingly look westward and wonder how different things might have been had I went with Tony. 

A bar and grille called ‘McShane’s Lounge  just down the street from Larry’s apartment figured prominently in my life some years later. Me and three of my co-workers at P.R. Mallory ate lunch there every day for perhaps five years. At that time, the TV show, ‘Jeopardy’  was on at noon and it became an everyday challenge to see how much more (or less) knowledge that we possessed compared to the contestants. 

McShanes now, obviously abandoned.

Mcshane’s was THE place to be in Indianapolis on St. Paddys and seats were at a premium.  More often than not, on that particular holiday, we went somewhere else for lunch.

McShane’s day waitress was a lady named Mary of undeterminable age. She was grey haired, bent over by osteoporosis and moved about a half a mile an hour. She looked very old to me at the time, maybe even sixty or so. Of course, I was only thirty or thereabouts at the time. 

Mary was also the cook on the limited menu grill. She made chili served one of five ways and cheeseburgers with chips. Occasionally I would have the five way chili but for the most part, I had the same meal everyday; a cheesburger with lettuce, tomato and mayonaise. Mary also introduced me to sliced Jalapeno hot peppers on my sandwich. I had little exposure to hot peppers in Loogootee and I loved the tangy, fiery taste that they added to my cheeseburger. I also felt very street wise eating those peppers.

There was a problem with this, however. After perhaps a month of this diet, I began to suspect that I had rectal cancer. My hind end burned like fire and I was too modest to mention it to anyone so I suffered in silence. Eventually, I made the connection between the Jalapenos and my digestive system. I began to eat the chili more often and over time, my posterior adapted to this new way of eating and it quit hurting so much. 

 I took the above pictures and we left the area, driving east. Behind us, a few blocks west on New York Street, stood the house where Sylvia Likens was tortured to death by Gertrude Banazewski and a couple of teenagers. That story was front page news for weeks and sadly, today it wouldn’t bear more than a mention on the second page of the city and state section. 

North of us, on East 21st street, stands the house where I lived when I first moved to Indianapolis to be nearer to Susie. A little further east, still standing, was the Skyline motel where I stayed on my very first visit to the big city and where my friend Billy lost his brand new set of dentures. 

There are stories about both of those places still in the forefront of my mind and if I wasn’t so hungry, I would tell you about them. Maybe someday if you’re interested. In the meantime, I went in search of a place to eat lunch. I drove by a small building on the western edge of Irvington, a neighborhood filled with large two story frame homes that represented the best there was to have in the old days. The small building used to house Arthur Treacher’s Fish and Chips where I used to stop on the way home and get a couple of orders of fish for me and Susie.   

Eat Arthur’s fish and you would throw rocks at Long John Silver.  It was the best I ever had. Of course, it was a different day and the whole idea of cooking fish and french fries and then calling it fish and chips was a novelty to me.

I knew that Mr Treacher had pulled up stakes and left town years ago but I was hoping against hope that he’d changed his mind. Nope. Today, the building houses a chinese carryout called Cheerful something or other. It didn’t look at all appetizing.

We decided to just go home and eat.

Faux twitter. (Or is it Tweet?)

Real time action:

Right at this moment, as I was typing my treatise on the big dance, Susie arrived upstairs and stood over me watching me type.

“Do you have a pair of scissors up here?” She asked.

Demonstrating my superior organization skills, I pulled out the top right hand drawer of my new desk and handed her a pair of red handled scissors. 

She grabbed the back of my head and proceeded to trim my eyebrows.

“What are you doing?” I yelled, afraid to move, seeing nothing but the blades of the scissors less than an inch from my nose.

“For God’s sake, have you looked at the length of these eyebrows? ” She held up her hand, brandishing three long strands of hair between her thumb and index finger. “You look like Bobby Knight.”

“Are you crazy?” I fired back. “I know women who would die for eyebrows as long as mine.”

‘No they wouldn’t. Women like long eyelashes, not brows.”

“Oh.” 

There’s obviously something in Susie’s past that has warped her feelings about hair; be it ear, nose or eyebrow.  I have no idea what it might be. Perhaps she was frightened by the story of Rapunzel in the tower.