This is kind of a hybrid trip diary/blog post report - I visited Chicago where I really got sober although I had quit drinking a few months earlier and Columbus, current home of my sponsor and Willie.
It was a good trip. Frankly, the big draw was seeing my three best friends from high school in the flesh and blood. It was far, far too long for a couple of them - maybe next time it will be on a sun-kissed beach, escaping a NE winter. I'm grateful for these friendship that have lasted forever - I'm aware how rare they tend to be for middle-aged American men. I love these guys.
Evanston and The Gold Coast were really, really great, too. Wonderful to poke around my old stomping grounds in a city where I felt more at home than anyplace but vacation city and sincity. That being said the short experience confirmed quickly that it is not the place for me. And it's not just the cold, dark winters, either - it looked brutalized and beaten up, worn-out, dirty, vaguely brutish. The nice areas like Evanston had a vaguely fake feel to them - new and sanitized, sort of a theme park Chicago.
Mrs. G, mother and aunt to my buddies, was a marvel. Huzzah. And . . . that guy whose name I've already forgotten . . . is, I think, a blessing. Old people lose so many of their family and friends that they can feel isolated, so a good companion can be a wonderful thing.
Stepping off the plane in Columbus was a revelation. Why this surprises me I no longer know. The first restaurant I saw was a Bob Evans Express. Give me some biscuits and gravy, fast! If I live here for the rest of my days - and this I plan to do - I'll never really be a local. I fit in just fine but I'm still clearly The Other, what with my dress slacks and suit jackets and brisk, dry Midwestern sarcasm. I'm more at home in the Midwest but I stand out there, too, but not as starkly. I'm the guy in a suit with green socks and a pork pie hat. Vaguely out of place.
I walked around OSU for a while. Man, 40 years has made a big difference. So many new buildings - the money must be pouring in. I heard they had a billion dollar fund-raising campaign that they exceeded by 10%. Hard to believe that it's rated as one of the top 15 public universities in the US (most of them are either in CA or in the Big Ten). One of my old homes was still there, looking pretty much the same, and one was gone, replaced by a big, new University complex. I did not go by the College of Optometry - site of the most massive and painful defeat in my adult life - for purely one-way street logistical reasons and not out of any sense of shame or fear. And what a good thing in retrospect - the circumstances of that profession have changed radically over the years and would have not made for a pleasant career for me.
I enjoyed my time with my current sponsor, a guy who was my original sponsor in Indy 30 years ago and who I last eyeballed in 1992. It was, I think, important for me to make that physical contact again even though the emotional bond sprang back to life almost immediately when we began to communicate a year or so ago. The second most important reason for my trip.
I also got to spend an afternoon with my oldest and dearest friend from sincity who now lives in C-Town. Another musician. Three of my best buddies here? A professional bass player who toured with Frank Zappa; a consultant for the LA County water district who is a Ben-like intellectual, capable of playing Mahler on a French horn; and a hydrologist engineer who owns a store that sells guitars and repairs anything with strings.
I ate Skyline once. It was transcendent. I had a 4 way with onion and a coney with andouille sausage instead of the standard rubber dog. This was a mistake but not a terrible one. I did not grace the inside of a Frisch's.
On to Lancaster, home of the Fairfield County Fair, an event that I have probably attended 40 times in the last 60 years. My sister has that streak beat to hell. There I ate a mountain of shit food - a Riblet sandwich (think something you'd get at McDs), a braut, and an Italian sausage sandwich slathered in green peppers, onions, and red sauce - desserts were coconut creme pie, peanut butter bars, and confetti cake (homemade by booster organizations trying to raise money for a variety of county high schools), a sugar waffle, a sugar waffle dipped in chocolate, and an over-salted giant pretzel. It was disgusting and it was great. All the food was served by carnies in open-air food trailers of questionable provenance, dusty air blowing around, drifting in from the cattle barn and dirt horse track.
I got to walk around animal barns and see a demolition derby (think: Loud). The people were not of my clan concerning politics and morality in general. I've developed a real mean streak of intolerance with these folks which is unattractive and needs to be addressed.
I climbed to the top of Mt. Pleasant three times and looked down from the 250 foot summit to the fairgrounds below. The trees had not changed color one whit, odd for this time in October. I clambered around all of the old trails, memories flooding to the surface. I shed an old dress shirt and hung it on a tree in one out of the way spot - leaving a little bit of my spoor in an old haunt. I remembered climbing to the tip in the dark with dad year after year for an Easter sunrise service in all kinds of weather, including one trip in freshly fallen snow where we trail-blazed our way to the top. I remember dad slinking into the woods to take a crap once. My hope was always that this would count as my Sunday church-going experience but it usually didn't work. The mountain gets a little higher every year.
It was good to see my sister - not great, but good. It was definitely not good to see my brother-in-law Not Rex and my niece. The family is trying to live a certain kind of lifestyle while trying to pretend that they're not. Everything is Wyoming this and Wyoming that. At one point Not Rex talked to a woman from a little town who was in Lancaster for her daughter's soccer tournament.
"We're from Wyoming," Not Rex said while the woman looked blankly on.
I don't believe that a single comment was directed to me from Not Rex or my niece and the upwardly mobile, social climbing bullshit talk doesn't interest me at all. Poor Not Rex is a lawyer and a sharp guy but not especially successful. He doesn't possess the aggression to go far in business - one has to be willing to compete just like you're playing a football game. I made more money than he did and didn't care as much about it while working a lot less hours, and I sense this has really stuck in their craw. Not Rex isn't as clever or witty as he thinks he is so he often comes across as snide and condescending in an almost bullying tone. Hell, I've never liked the guy while being grateful that he's been a good husband and father and a stable presence in his family's life. I have progressed from unsuccessfully trying to be his friend to openly bickering with him to just kind of ignoring his presence.
Prickly Seaweed took offense many, many times . . .
The ass-juice story. I took one of the last rooms which was a handicapped accessible room. It had a large walk in shower - no tub - and there was a shower chair sitting off to the side. As a joke I turned on the hot water, dragged the chair into the shower, and let the water pound on my head, something I'd never do in water-precious SoCal. Not Rex and the niece were immediately appalled, repeating the word "ass-juice" over and over. They seem to be on the germophobe bandwagon, actually walking around with little bottles of hand sanitizer in their pockets. I didn't care enough to point out that they had spent the previous day eating food out of open-air trailers that had been prepared by carnies in what was basically an agricultural zone.
The someone stealing a flat-screen TV story in Wyoming after I made the correct comment that thieves are looking for money, drugs, and guns, not large electronics. Frankly, I think he made this story up.
The snide comment about Becky and me sitting down while he and my niece were walking around the arts and crafts barn, no doubt making fun of the efforts of small children to produce arts and/or crafts.
We also made a stop at the cemetery. It was good to see the graves. Maybe it was important to me to see the graves as I'm trying to process my grief at all the family losses. I took some pictures of the graves of our extended family. Maybe I'll do a little genealogy work, see where my people came from in the Old Country.
It seems to me I had a good, important, occasionally irritating trip. As it should be.
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