Ailantha - Blog

What I Learned At My 50th High School Reunion

12/7/2018

...Continued From yesterday:
Here we are on our graduation day, the Melrose Academy class of 1969. That's me in the bottom row, sitting second from the right.

Melrose Academy was a small private girls' school located in the Philadelphia suburb of Elkins Park,

...and run by the Grey Nuns of the Sacred Heart, an order of progressive, socially-conscious nuns out of Buffalo, New York, who taught at Melrose and lived in the Motherhouse, the big convent in the background of the above photo.

In my class there were thirty-eight girls who traveled to school each day from all parts of the city and suburbs.
Me, I took a daily commuter train from the Somerton station,

...to the Elkins Park station,

...from which I walked the approximate mile from the station to the school with the other Melrose girls who also took the train to school.

I met up with 18 of my former classmates (see me in the last row, 4th from the right? I distinctly recall that I was having a bad hair day that day, thus the hair band),

...plus several Melrose girls from different graduating classes who came along for fun and a couple of intrepid husbands who also came along, at my 50th high school reunion held at the Jarrettown Hotel in the Philadelphia suburb of Dresher.

Our class valedictorian and our salutatorian, then,

...and now.

The intrepid hubbies who came to the reunion,

...good sports all.

The Jarrettown Hotel was charming and cozy,

...and well-chosen by our classmate who stepped up to organize the reunion (left), and her two helpers (right and below).

And yet my initial impression of the venue wasn't of the venue itself, but of the happy energy that filled the room,

...probably because of how genuinely happy everyone seemed to see each other,

...and how instantly everyone fell into animated conversation - even before we'd had time to take off our coats and put down our purses - though some of us hadn't seen each other in decades,

...or had just met, even.

At dinner Tom and I ended up sitting with my old high school lunch table mates,

...though I think this arrangement just sort of happened by chance, as we were all looking for a place to sit at the same time.
In any case, dinner was wonderful, and I'm referring not just to the food, which was indeed very good,

...well, that is to say, Tom enjoyed his salmon,

...and I my pasta with vegetables,

...and though I didn't ask anyone how the chicken dish was, it, too, looked quite delicious.

And then there were the desserts.

     But more wonderful even than the food was the conversation at our table.
We talked about high school, who we were then and who we are now, and the role we thought the former played in the latter. We talked about the Melrose teachers and students, especially the girls in the grades above us, who influenced us and who we admired.
      One of the girls chuckled over the girl crush* she had as a freshman on an upperclassman. Her admission was rather a shock to me, as I, too, once had a girl crush on an older girl, but I had no idea other girls in the school were girlcrushing. It turned out a number of them were, as I learned before the night was over, when the subject was brought up again while were all standing around in a group after dinner talking and reminiscing about things. We just didn't have a word for it then, and so it wasn't a concept we could verbalize even to ourselves at the time.
       My own girl crush was on an upperclassman, a popular, personable, smart, athletic girl who was also a gifted singer, actress and class leader. My crush was born one day when this older girl, who I assumed was in general unaware of my existence, said something kind and encouraging to me. I don't even remember what it was she said, only that it made me feel worthwhile and good about myself. Here was a girl who, in my eyes at least, already possessed the star dust of social popularity to spare, and yet in sprinkling some on me increased her own wealth of it.
     I'm sure the girl had no idea of the effect of her words on me and probably soon forgot all about the encounter.
        But here the encounter is, fifty years later, still sitting in my memory bank, where it has gathered the interest of time, experience and, hopefully, wisdom.
   And if the lesson of that older girl's random words of kindness was lost on me at the time, if I was too focused on floundering my way through the volcanic soup of my own teen-age emotions to realize that I, too, possessed the power of a kind word, well, revisiting that memory was a reminder that it's a lesson never to late for the learning.
       It was a gift spending the day with these girls, who still looked young to me.

*Girl Crush: "A straight girl's crush on another girl, often a celebrity. Is platonic in nature. A girl who is girlcrushing must by definition be straight, otherwise it's just a regular crush. Usually based on veneration at some level." The Urban Dictionary

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Back To The Playground

12/5/2018

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...Continued from yesterday:

The next morning, Sunday, November 18, the day of my 50th high school reunion, Tom and I began the day by seeking out breakfast at a homey-looking diner we'd passed about a block down the Boulevard from our hotel,

...that had the neatest parking lot art,

...the most gorgeous pastries in the display case that greeted one at the entry,

...and a cute interior.

Along with the menu selections Andy's also offered a vast buffet,

...which included the creamiest-looking bread pudding, my personal weakness,

...and an omelet bar manned by a friendly chef.

We opted for the buffet and split an enormous omelet.

The food was fresh and fantastic, including the creamy bread pudding.

As we left we vowed that before the day's end we'd return to Andy's to snag ourselves some slices of those to-die-for-looking pastries.

As my reunion didn't start until 1 pm, giving us several hours to kill, we opted to return to my old Somerton neighborhood to have a look at my elementary school, St. Christopher's,

...as well as old St. Christopher's Church, where Tom and I were married, which was no longer the church but now utilized as the parish hall.

On a whim, I wanted to see if the playground where I spent at least part of every summer day after we moved to the New House in Somerton (See previous post) was still where it always was, on Kelvin Street behind St. Christopher's school and also behind Comely School, the public school at the corner of Byberry Road and Kelvin Street. The two schools and the playground formed three points of a geographic triangle, thus the playground was within walking distance for almost every school kid in Somerton. And walk there we all did.
The playground was still there and in good repair,

...as were the old basketball and tennis courts,

...and the baseball diamond,

...as well as the modern art mosaic on the office building, which I always loved and thought made our playground fancier than other playgrounds.

But, alas, the playground was no longer meant for the big kids, such as I was back when the playground was my turf,

...the swings and climbing structures appearing to have been designed for young children.

And the field and woods behind St. Christopher's through which we used to walk to the playground was gone, having been replaced by streets and houses.

Things change.

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The New House, Part 3

12/3/2018

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...Continued from 11/27/2018, 11/28/2018 and 11/29/2018:

After spending the morning in Mayfair in Lower Northeast Philly,

...visiting the environs of my family's old house on Barnett Street,

...Tom and I then drove north on the Roosevelt Boulevard toward the Far Northeast neighborhood of Somerton to have a look at the New House on Byberry Road between Roosevelt Boulevard and Bustleton Avenue that we moved into when I was nine years old.
I hadn't seen the house in almost 25 years, but I know that it looked like this when we lived in it:

...and like this decades later after it had been trashed and abandoned by subsequent owners and homeless
squatters.

About half-way to Somerton we approached the Rhawn Street intersection,

...at which point I asked Tom, who was doing the driving while I did the reminiscing, to turn left off the Boulevard onto Rhawn Street.
I had him do this because much of the action in my novel,

...Equal and Opposite Reactions,

...takes place in a run-down condo complex that I set at the intersection of the Roosevelt Boulevard and Rhawn Street, and so I wanted to see if perchance there actually was a condo complex set at the corner of Rhawn and the Boulevard.
Turned out there wasn't a condo complex where I imagined the one in my book to be. Just a whole lot of row houses. Still, this would have been a good location for a condo complex. If not for all the row houses.
We then continued on to Somerton via the Bustleton Avenue route, passing along the way the McDonald's at Red Lion Road where I worked one summer while in college,

...and the Leo Mall a couple of blocks from my street where there used to be a movie theater at which I spent most Friday nights of my teen-aged years.

My girl friends and I could go to the movies together only on Friday nights, as, according to the social norms of the times, Saturday nights at the movies were reserved for couples. Thus us single girls used to spend Saturday nights at each other's houses, playing board games, listening to records, or watching TV.

We reached the corner of Byberry and Bustleton, where Pavio's restaurant used to be,

...in the banquet room of which Tom and I had our wedding reception almost 42 years ago,

...But which is now Pavio's Galleria of Shops.

We turned onto Byberry Road,

...then parked on Lewis Street,

...the small street that bordered the building and parking lot next to our backyard.

The building, which has been in this location since we moved next to it in 1961, and likely years before, has had a number of purposes over the years.

     I believe it originally belonged to the local Catholic parish, St. Christopher's, and for a while was used as over-flow class rooms for the parish school located around the corner. The building was used for the sixth grade classes when I was in sixth grade at St. Christopher's. That was the best year of my elementary career, as all I had to do was cut across the back yard to get to and from school.
       Years later it was the United Hebrew Happy Daze daycare center.
       Here's the sign currently in front of the building:

After we parked the car we walked around the corner, and what to our wondering eyes should appear:

... but the House,

...looking absolutely,

...fabulous!

All right, so mayhaps the landscaping and setting left a weence to be desired, but the house itself looked great.

We were particularly impressed by the front steps.

These were the best steps the house had had since the wooden steps that my hubby Tom built for the house back in 1994,

…and which had survived the years of abuse and neglect that the house withstood after my parents moved out.

We walked all around the house,

...trying to get a peek through the windows, which were papered over.

     Tom was able to see over the top of the paper in one of the front windows. He said he could see that the wall between the kitchen and dining room had been knocked out and that the plaster had been stripped to the studs and was being replaced by new plasterboard.
      We also saw two heat pump and air-conditioning units, which meant that vents would have to be installed throughout the house to accommodate the new heating and air-conditioning systems.
      I, in the meantime, was busy snapping shots of the houses across the street that used to be the houses of of our old neighbors and playmates,

...and the house of our friends next door, who lived in an even bigger domicile than ours,

...though the first floor had been a doctor's office while the doctor's family resided on the second and third floors.

However we now saw that the backyard of the doctor's house been filled with a massive cinder block structure attached to the back of the house.

"Hi," called a voice from across the street.
I turned around and immediately recognized one of my childhood playmates, the youngest daughter of the seven children of the big, friendly Italian family who lived in the house directly across the street from ours.

     "I knew it was you," she said as we hugged. "I called my brother to tell him somebody was looking all around the house across the street and taking pictures, but when I saw you taking pictures of my house, too, I knew it was you."
      She invited us into her house. In truth when I was young and used to be in and out of that house, just as all the neighborhood kids were in and out of each other's houses, I never appreciated what a neat house it was: Lots of dark wood, wood floors, big wood banister, marble in the bathroom.
        She updated us on our old house, told us about the non-grata hippy family who moved in after my parents moved out (see previous post), how one of the children set a fire in the attic (I'd heard about the fire before, but had forgotten about it), how the parents moved out and left the teenagers to live there alone.
        "Who leaves a bunch of teen-agers alone living in a house?" she asked.
        She told us about how the house was eventually abandoned and for a while was lived in by homeless people.
        "I didn't say nothing about it," she said. "They didn't cause any trouble, and a person needs a roof over their head, I'm not gonna begrudge them."
           The house was bought, she told me, by a man who was in the process of fixing up the house to sell it. "A Hispanic guy, nice guy, lives down the street." She told us that the man had recently invited her into the house to show her how the work was progressing. She said he was completely gutting the inside, renovating it top to bottom.
           Just as my mother dreamed of doing.

I asked her about the cinder block structure built onto our old next-door neighbors' house.

     She told me that the house had been bought by a Hasidic organization, and that soon after the group moved in she and several other neighbors went over to welcome them to the neighborhood.
      "The guy who answered the door said he wasn't interested," she said. "I told him, 'Look, we're all neighbors and in this neighborhood everybody knows each other and looks out for each other and keeps an eye out for each other.'"
        The man repeated that he wasn't interested and shut the door.
       I thought it was too bad that those new neighbors had so carelessly brushed off the good fortune of landing in this neighborhood.

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The New House, Part 2

11/29/2018

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...Continued from yesterday:
A reader commented on Facebook that it was too bad that yesterday's post didn't include any inside shots of The New House,

...which motivated me to sift through my stash of old photo albums from whence I often glean vintage pictures for blog posts.

...to look for any photos I might have of the interior of the house.
In the process of my sifting I came across another good shot of the exterior of the house,

...but, alas, only a few random, not-great shots of the interior, none of which tell much of a story of the house, but which I'll post anyway:

1. Our dog Brownie in the front bay window of the living room.

2. My Aunt Mary in the living room.

3. My brother and his wife at the other end of the living room.

4. Tom and me on our wedding day in the front bay window of the other living room, which we called the far living room. My mother made the partially visible stained glass piece hanging the window behind us.

5. Me sitting at the other end of the far living room.

6. The bedroom that my sister and I shared. There was a bump in the street in front of our house and, as Byberry Road was a busy street at all hours, while lying in bed I'd feel the house rattle a little every time a car or truck passed our house

7. My brother in the dining room. I made the arty collage on the wall and the arty "Shalom" hanging on the basement door during my young, arty phase.

I don't know what became of the "Shalom" hanging, but the arty collage currently sits over my fireplace mantle. You can see the spot in the lower left corner where one of our house bunnies once nibbled off the paper ( See post from 2/15/2016: "The House Bunny").

I even caught her in the act.

7. Me with my prom date in the dining room ( See post from 5/16/2014: "A Tale of Two Proms, Part One: The Bad Prom").

8. My sister in the kitchen.

9. My father at the kitchen table, his favorite sitting spot in the house. Our kitchen table was a picnic table that my mother covered with a piece of linoleum. One of our childhood pastimes was setting a piece of paper on the table and running a crayon over the paper to bring out the design on the linoleum table top.

10. View from the dining room of my father in the kitchen.

11. A better view of the linoleum top on the kitchen table. That's my daughter Maria and my nephew Joseph apparently having a snack during a visit with Grammy and Pop-Pop.

12. A bunch of the grandchildren sitting on the kitchen table.

13. My sister-in-law hanging laundry in the back yard.

    In late 1994 my parents moved from Northeast Philly to Seaford, Delaware.
    The house on Byberry Road was bought by a hippy-esque family with six or eight children and - according to the old neighbors with whom my mother still communicated - strange and unsavory ways. The parents eventually moved out and left a few teenagers behind who trashed the house then abandoned it. According to the neighbors the house became for a while a refuge for some homeless squatters, whom the neighbors preferred over the previous hippy owners.
     I don't know who owned the house when it eventually went on the market looking like this:

...but my daughter found some pictures posted online of the house's interior when the house was for sale:

A year and a half ago someone bought the house.
To be continued...

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The New House, Part 1

11/28/2018

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Give the gift of a good read!
EQUAL AND OPPOSITE REACTIONS
by Patti Liszkay
Buy it on Amazon
http://amzn.to/2xvcgRa
"This part drama and part slapstick comedy is a tour-de-force." Amazon Review

The New House, Part 1

...Continued from yesterday:

I was nine years old in the summer of 1961,

...when my family moved eight miles up the Roosevelt Boulevard from Mayfair in Lower Northeast Philadelphia to Somerton in Far Northeast Philadelphia (see yesterday's post),

...to our new house on Byberry Road between the Boulevard and Bustleton Avenue.

Though Byberry Road was a busy thoroughfare and our new house was a short block from the Bustleton Avenue commercial district,

The view from our Byberry Road house

...still, compared to the population and row house density of Mayfair this new neighborhood felt downright pastoral.
We moved to this particular house because while my mother was raising her five children in a 1300-square-foot, 3 bedroom, 1 bathroom row house she was dreaming of acquiring a big old fixer-upper of a house that she could transform into her vision of a beautiful home.
Though someone else would doubtless have dubbed the 6-bedroom, 3-story behemoth on Byberry Road a teardown – it was already over 100 years old in 1961 –

...my mother fell in love with it and, with my father’s acquiescence, bought the house on her own for $11,000, a pittance even back then, and sunk into it $5,000 worth of contractor work before my father or any of the rest of us laid eyes on it.
     When we finally did lay eyes on and set foot inside the house it was still in a rough state, but all that summer long every day my mother would load us children into the car and drive out to the New House where she’d work, steaming wallpaper off the walls, spackling and painting the walls, repairing the window frames and tackling all sorts of repair and home improvement jobs that most kids’ mothers would have no idea of how to do.
       My brothers and I, meanwhile, with our 3-year-old baby sister in tow, ran around the new neighborhood meeting the new neighborhood kids.
       Every day at lunch time my mother would stop working to fix us cold cut sandwiches, sodas and Tastykakes which we ate picnic-style on the bare wood living room floor, sometimes with a new friend or two whom we’d invited to join us. That was the best summer.

As it turned out my mother was never able to fulfill her dream of renovating the house the way she wanted to. Why I'm not sure, though I suppose it was a matter of expense and maybe the fact that she was the sole member of the household with any interest in home decor or improvement beyond the basic functional and structural necessities.
Still, my mother did what she could.

For example, if she couldn't get the front porch step repaired she'd just plant flowers where the step should be.

My sister Romaine. Above, with our dog Brownie.

Nonetheless my mother never tired of talking about her ideas for the house, how she wanted to extend the wall of this room, knock out the wall of that room, reconfigure one room and transform another.
But in the end, for all the years we lived in it, the New House,

...stayed an old house,

...and it wasn't until 25 years after my parents moved out that someone else caught sight of the old house on Byberry Road, by now abandoned and decrepit,

...and saw in it the same kind of potential that my mother had seen in it almost 50 years earlier.
And it would be this person who would finally do with the house what my mother had always wanted to.
To be continued...

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The Old House On Barnett Street

11/27/2018

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On Friday, November 16, I was once again at the "One of Us" Columbus airport. (See posts from 4/29/2018, "What's So Funny At The Columbus Airport" and 4/30/2018, "One Of Us! One Of Us!").

This time I was traveling with Tom,

....on our way to a week-long visit with our daughter, son-in-law and grand children in Los Angeles,

....with a stop-over in Philadelphia to attend my 50th high school reunion.

My 1969 high school year book, The Rose. Note the psychedelic color scheme, which was in vogue at that time.

My year book photo.

Tom and I arrived in Philly on Friday evening, picked up our rental car and drove across town to our hotel, The Radisson on the Roosevelt Boulevard in Far Northeast Philadelphia.

We chose a hotel in this location because we’d decided to spend a day visiting the old Northeast neighborhoods where I grew up,

…and from which I drew the inspiration for my novel, “Equal and Opposite Reactions.”

In fact our hotel was located across the Boulevard from the old Lincoln Hotel, where Tom and I had our rehearsal dinner the night before we were married.

Though, in truth, The Lincoln was looking a bit more down-at-the-heels than I recalled it looking the night of our rehearsal dinner 42 years ago.
The following morning, Saturday morning, while driving down the Boulevard looking for a breakfast eatery we soon came upon an IHOP,

...where we found the food and service to be exceptionally good.

       After breakfast we headed out to our first destination, The Old House on Barnett Street.
       I grew up in two houses, The Old House on Barnett Street and The New House, though after a while The New House was no longer referred to by us as The New House, and became just our house.
       The Old House on Barnett Street was located in Lower Northeast Philly - Lower referring to the most southern areas closer to downtown - in the neighborhood known as Mayfair.
       Far Northeast Philly, on the other hand, refers to the most northern areas of the Northeast. The New House was located in the Somerton neighborhood of the Far Northeast.
         So we drove south along the Roosevelt Boulevard,

"...the great artery that pumped twelve lanes of traffic through the heart of Northeast Philadelphia," (That's a quote from my book, page 11).

...until we arrived in Mayfair, at which time we turned off the Boulevard and cruised some of the streets of my childhood, marveling now,

...as I never did when I was young,

...at the great number,

...and variety,

...of row houses.

We decided to park next to St. Timothy's Catholic Church at the corner of Levick and Battersby Streets, which is next to St. Timothy's school, my old elementary school, then walk from there back to the house on Barnett, re-tracing the route I used to walk to school.

St. Timothy's Church.

I was likewise never aware when I was young of what a magnificent structure my parish church was,

...or that its grounds took up a square city block of Levick Street,

... bounded on the corners by Battersby and Hawthorne Streets,

...including the rectory,

...the convent,

...and the grade school,

...the name of which has been changed from St. Timothy's to Blessed Trinity.

In the dreams I still have about St. Tim's it's an enormous building in which I'm very small and lost among the hallways and stairwells.
But in revisiting the place 57 years later, I can see that it's not just a matter of its size having been amplified by my childhood memories:

...St. Timothy's- now called Blessed Trinity - really is a big school.

And yet, for all its size, when I was growing up St. Tim's accommodated only the Catholic portion of the neighborhood children:

Directly across the street from St. Timothy's was the even bigger public school, Ethan Allen.

...Northeast Philadelphia being a teeming East Coast population center when I was young, as it still is today.
After we'd looked over St. Tim's

...we crossed Hawthorne and walked down Levick,

...towards Barnett Street

...crossed Frankfort avenue,

...on the other side of which began Barnett Street, our block of which was six row houses bounded by the Devon at Frankfort Avenue,

...and our Old House, 4020 Barnett Street, at Charles street.

When I was 6 years old the Devon switched from being a conventional movie theater to a porn house. The nuns at St. Timothy's told us the Devon had turned into a bad place and to cover our eyes if we ever had to pass by it. As I had to pass by the Devon every day on my way home from school and whenever I walked around the block, which was probably every day as well, I always covered my eyes, at least until I got tired of always having to cover my eyes, after which I just tried not to look at the display posters as I passed by. Sometimes I looked at the dirty posters anyway, just because it was too hard not to. However I don't recall learning anything in particular from the posters.
One time when I was strolling around the block by myself as I often did, I caught two boys lighting matches that they had wedged into the doorway. I figured they were trying to burn the Devon down because it was such a bad place. After they ran away I hurried over to the door of the Devon and, my heart pounding in fear of the building exploding into fire, quickly blew out all the matches.

Evidently the Devon is now the Kingdom Life Christian center.

...and the alley between the Devon and the row houses where my friends, siblings, and myself used to play has been blocked off and trashed.

And what used to be a row of businesses along Frankfort Avenue, a shoe store, a pizzeria, an appliance store and a couple other small commercial establishments,

...is now part of the Kingdom Life Christian Center;

...and the drug store on the corner at the end of the block that we called Bud's,

...is now a Republican Party office.

However the view of the other side of Frankfort Avenue looked surprisingly the same as I remembered it from 60 years ago, though I expect the businesses have changed since then.

As for our Old House on Barnett Street, I thought it looked pretty nice, if a bit worn.

We walked around the corner to the alley that ran behind the rows of houses where all the neighborhood children used to play when we were young.

View of the alley across the street from our alley.

In the back yard of my old house hung laundry on lines that appeared to be strung between the same laundry poles that were there when I was young.

My father's medical practice was located in our basement, and his patients would enter his office through the partially visible white door next to the garage. The garage door now appears to be missing, replaced with plastic sheeting.
While Tom and I were standing in the alley the owner of the old house came outside. He was from Kazakhstan and spoke little English but I was able to convey to him the I used to live in his house and he was able to convey that he'd lived there for six years,

...and that he'd built the deck on the side of the house.

   I was a little taken aback by the sight of the deck because in my recurring dreams about this house the house usually has a side door that it didn't have when I lived in it. But now in fact it does have a side door.
      I would love to have seen what the old house looks like on the inside but the owner did not invite us in.
       So we instead said good-bye to him and took a walk around the block,

...then crossed Charles Street and con-tinued up the next block of Barnett,

...to see if Haegele's, the bakery shop where my mother used to occasionally buy a square custardy cheesecake for our dessert, was still at the end of the block, at Barnett and Robbins Street.
Turned out Haegele's was still there,

...and quite crowded on this Saturday morning with folks buying goodies,

...among which can still be found the square custardy cheese cakes,

...of which Tom and I bought a piece,

...and which the sales clerk boxed and tied up with string, just as they used to do when I was young

Then, our Haegele's cheesecake in tow,

...we walked back, passing the Old House on Barnett Street one last time on our way back to St. Tim's,

...where we retrieved out car and headed back to the Roosevelt Boulevard, by which route we left the Lower Northeast and Mayfair and headed towards the Far Northeast and Somerton to the New House.

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Saturday At The Swap-O-Rama

11/21/2018

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Don't sweat the holidays!
Give the gift of a sweet and spicy read!
"Equal and Opposite Reactions" by Patti Liszkay
Buy it on Amazon
http://amzn.to/2xvcgRa

Saturday At The Swap-O-Rama

...Continued from yesterday:

On Saturday morning we walked over to the Bucktown neighborhood,

....to an awesome breakfast place called the Yolk Test Kitchen,

...where one orders and pays for one's food at the counter and shortly thereafter one's food arrives at one's table, beautifully plated and as delicious as it looks.

Along with our breakfasts we also ordered French toast with fresh berries to share. It was a taste of heaven.

Besides the wonderful food, the Yolk Test Kitchen also offers a pretty view of the 606 walking path (see yesterday's post).

After breakfast we walked back to Claire and Miguel's.

      Claire wanted to go to the Swap-O-Rama, a Mexican flea market on the South Side of Chicago, to buy some more pieces for her Nacimiento,
     A Nacimiento is a traditional Mexican nativity scene which typically includes a variety of human and animal figurines set in a miniature environment that can include plants, structures, and bodies of imaginary or real water.
     Every Christmas Claire and Miguel set up their Nacimiento in their window.

I, too, was looking forward to returning to the Swap-O-Rama, as last time Claire and Miguel took me there during a visit to Chicago two years ago I had a churro,

...which is a fried dough stick covered in sugar and stuffed with raspberry filling,

...kind of like a tubular jelly doughnut,

...and I was looking forward to having another one.
So Miguel drove us across town to the South Side,

...until we arrived at the Swap-O-Rama.

The Swap-O-Rama is located inside a vast big-box structure,

...within which one can find all sorts of neat and useful things.

However we were there to look for Nacimiento pieces, of which there was a great variety available,

...and Claire and Miguel were able to find several nice pieces to add to their Nacimiento.

As for me, I bought a rosary for my mother,

...a super-warm hat for me,

...and one for Claire,

...and, of course, my yummy churros.

After we'd made all our acquisitions we returned home,

...and hung out with the kitties,

...until we were hungry again.

For dinner we walked back to Bucktown,

....to a Mexican restaurant called La Estrella Negra,

...the decor of which was Mexican Day of the Dead.

The food was really good.

The walls of La Estrella Negra are hung with art pieces for sale and one of these pieces, a print of a human heart upon which was drawn a map of the Chicago "L", or elevated train, caught the eyes of Miguel and Claire.

Before we left I surreptitiously bought the " 'L' Corazon" print, which now looks lovely hanging on Claire and Miguel's bright green wall among their other maps (see post from 11/17/2018).
The following morning, Sunday morning, Claire walked me back to the actual "L,"

...where I was soon taking in the Sunday morning cityscape from the platform,

...waiting for the train back to O'Hare.

...and from O'Hare,

...my plane back to "One of Us" Columbus.
(See posts from 4/29/2018 and 4/30/2018).

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Eat, Walk, Cocoon

11/19/2018

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...Continued from yesterday:

By Friday morning, November 9, winter and the first snowfall had arrived in Chicago.

Our plan for the day had been to take the "L" - short for "elevated train" and the local vernacular for Chicago's rapid transit train system - to the Loop area of downtown and spend the day doing something cultural, maybe visiting the aquarium or the Chicago Art Institute. Nor were we intending to be put off by a few flakes of snow,

...barely noticeable by Chi Town standards.

But first on the agenda was breakfast.

We took the bus from Claire and Miguel's Logan Square neighborhood to nearby Wicker Park to one of their favorite breakfast eateries,

...a little spot called Kanela.

Claire had her favorite, avocado toast,

...while Miguel had his favorite, Pork Belly Benedict. As I'd never before tasted pork belly, Miguel gave me a taste of his. To me it tasted kind of like a thin, tender, flavorful pork chop.

I tried the Impossible Burger,

...a vegan burger that was advertised as being indistinguishable from a beef burger.

I'm not sure that was the case, but with all the fixings piled on it was a darned good burger.

By the time we finished breakfast the snow had stopped, but after our nice meal in that warm, cozy restaurant the air outside felt so cold and damp that we all agreed that it might be lovely to just return home and spend the day cocooning.
So we walked through Wicker Park,

...back to Logan Square,

...via the 606, a former elevated train route that is now a walking/biking path.

And so we spent the day cocooning with the kitties (see yesterday's post),

...until dinner time rolled around, at which time we again ventured out,

...until we reached our destination, a vegan restaurant called The Chicago Diner.

We started out with an appetizer of seitan barbecued ribs that were incredibly delicious.

The rest of our food, not so much.

The eggplant ricotta rolls over linguini dish that I ordered looked lovely but was so spicy hot that I could barely swallow one bite.

Claire's seitan and vegetables was just as inedibly hot.

Miguel's Cuban sandwich and vegan macaroni and cheese, on the other hand, were tasteless.

So, except for the appetizer, dinner was kind of a bust all around.
Still, we did have a nice brisk walk back home,

...where it was comfy and warm.

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Cozy House Of Cats

11/17/2018

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...Continued from yesterday:
Chicago is not only a windy city, but a cold, cold city in winter, and in Chicago winter comes early.

By Friday, the day after my arrival, the snowflakes had begun falling outside.

But inside Miguel and Claire's house it's always warm and cozy.

This little white wolf sitting at the top of their staircase is a prop from Miguel’s Halloween costume,

...the year he and Claire were characters from “Game of Thrones”

Among the photos on the fireplace mantle,

...is one of Miguel taken when he was five years old at his kindergarten in Guadalajara, Mexico.

Their house is decorated with maps of all the places they’ve traveled to for medical missions or other work trips, or for adventure.

Colombia, where they went to pay homage to their favorite author, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and visit the settings of his books.

Haiti

Their shower curtain is a map of the world.

Claire and Miguel share their cozy digs with their three cats, Sassy, Siri and Tinums (see yesterday's post).
Or perhaps it would be more appropriate to say that, having been invited in, the kitties have now appropriated the property, which they share with Miguel and Claire.

But then cats have a way of doing that.

Claire and Miguel's house is as purposely feline-friendly as any kitty could wish,

...filled with comfy cat spaces,

...a little house,

...elevated structures,

...and hammocks in the window,

...the better from which to watch their favorite backyard show,

...birds on a wire.

     One evening during my visit Claire noticed that an apparently stray cat who'd been hanging around their block was outside their house.
        "Should I go get that cat?" she wondered.
        "And do what with it?" I asked.
         "Bring it home. In case it doesn't have a place to live."
         I laughed and Miguel gave her the eye.
         As of the day I left they were still managing to hold the line at three.

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Flying To Chitown

11/14/2018

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Last Thursday, November 8, I flew from Columbus to Chicago to visit Miguel and Claire.

This was my first time flying to Chicago.

In the past I'd always taken the wonderful Megabus,

...until, much to my dismay, Megabus dropped its Columbus-Chicago route.
On Tom's and my previous visit to Chicago last May we tried traveling via Greyhound Bus, which turned out to be a vile experience (See post from 5/13/2018, "Greyhounding It To Chicago").
As I hope to never again have to take a Greyhound bus, this now leaves us two options for traveling to Chicago: driving or flying. I once drove to Chicago by myself years ago and found driving in that city to be the first ring of Hades, the second ring being trying to find a parking spot anywhere on the streets of my daughter's urban neighborhood.

And so this time, as I was again traveling alone, I reluctantly opted for the pricier but oh-so-much quicker and more convenient flight option.
Thus I started out the morning in my favorite airport, Columbus John Glen International,

...where one is still reminded at every turn that here in Columbus we are all One Of Us (see posts from 4/29/2018, "What's So Funny At The Columbus Airport" and 4/30/2018, "One Of Us! One Of Us!").

As I had a little time to kill before my flight I had a breakfast of two bagels at the airport Bob Evans.

Though I expect one bagel would have been sufficient for me, I bought two because when I attempted to buy one the server, whom I would guess form his accent to be from an African country, warned me that the bagels there were very small and advised me that if I wanted a big bagel I should go across the way to Starbucks. When I hesitated in my decision he became quite insistent about the insufficiency of a single Bob Evans bagel and the superiority of the Starbucks bagels. So I asked if I could have two bagels, to which agreed, finally seeming satisfied that this customer wouldn't go hungry,

...which, in fact, I didn't.

Then, more than satiated after my two-bagel breakfast, I boarded my plane. 56 minutes after take-off I deplaned at Chicago O'Hare.

Having insisted that I did not wish to be picked up at the airport by my daughter or son-in-law, but preferred to find my way to their house via public transport, I followed the signs through the airport to the trains to downtown,

...then joined my fellow passengers,

...until I de-trained at the Western Avenue stop at Logan Square.

I then walked several blocks through the neighborhood,

...until I reached their house,

...where I was greeted by Miguel, who was quite relieved that his mother-in-law had found her way from O'Hare,

...and their three cats, Sassy, Siri,

...and Tinums, a little cat,

...who was hanging around the school auditorium in Texas where the disaster response team Claire was part of after Hurricane Harvey had set up an emergency medical center.

The members of Claire's medical team called the orphaned cat Rosie, but after Claire brought the cat home with her from Texas she and Miguel changed the kitty's name to Tinums because she was so tiny. (But isn't anymore).

After I settled into my cozy guest room,

...Miguel suggested that he and I - Claire was at work - drive over to an awesome little Italian Deli he knew of called Bari's to get a couple of their famous subs for lunch.