(no subject)
June 11
...CHICAGO... June 11, 1954: A STRONG HEAT WAVE HIT MUCH OF NORTHERN ILLINOIS. CHICAGO HAD A HIGH TEMPERATURE OF 97 DEGREES...STARTING AN ELEVEN-DAY RUN WITH TEMPERATURES 90 DEGREES OR HIGHER. TWO HIGH TEMPERATURE RECORDS WERE SET DURING THE ELEVEN DAY PERIOD.
This was how I came into the world. The hottest freaking June 11th in the history of Chicago. Each year I would be reminded by my father of this fact. He would turn on WGN to see the weather and point to the screen as the records for the day were broadcast.
“Yeah,” he would recount. “It was a hot one. Your mother and I were bunching radishes that morning when she told me to take her to the hospital. We made it to Ingalls just in time too. You were born right around noon. I had to dump all the radishes we had bunched that morning. Didn’t go to South Water Street that night. Too bad, radishes were good money then.”
It is the sacrifice that a father who runs a truck garden made when a child was born, I suppose.
I am amused this evening even after all these years of my father’s remembrance of the day. I will admit that at the time I was a bit aggravated at the retelling of my hottest day of the year birth. However, time has softened my hardened and be it younger view. Then again, I think that is what time does for a person. Your memories become more septa colored, the negative aspects disappear and you are left with what you want to have stored in your brain cells. It is a wonderful ability I have just recently begun to enjoy. It is not re-writing history, just editing it a bit.
I have started to reflect on the 56th year of my life with some whimsy. There is little to say about the date at this point. Fifty-six is not a milestone year like others. At twenty-one you are legal to drink. At thirty you need to get your life in gear. At forty you have to decide what it is you really want out of life. At fifty the insult of receiving your first AARP birthday greeting is beyond comprehension. At fifty-five you can qualify for senior citizen discounts at several stores and eateries. But at fifty-six there is nothing important or special to mark the occasion. I just receive the reminders that sixty is now only a few short years away. I have ignored most of these comments or retorted that indeed sixty is four years away and 2012 is two years away. Why worry?
I have been thinking about something my mother said years ago. She commented that she and my father had seen more technology come to pass and become part of the lives of humans than all other generations combined. I had to agree with her at the time. She had seen automobiles take over the world, television and radio become part of the home and had witnessed men walk on the moon. When she was born, horses were still used to pull milk carts through the streets of Hammond. So yes, she was right. At the time, that is.
In my life, so much has come to pass. Music has passed from being a shared experience to being a personal one. Ear buds plug the listener into their own world. I-pod. I-phones. Personal computers. Laptops. Cell phones. Cable television. Satellite television. Streamed video on computer. TiVo. Netflix. Flat screen televisions. Everything is digital, mircochipped or has a coaxial cable attached to it. Christmas lights are LED and laser lights come on key chains. Cars have computers and video screens. A box can tell me on which street to turn on. Al Gore invented the internet, Bill Kurtis discovered it and Spencer is actually using it. We have sent probes to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, landed one on an asteroid as it flew past. We discovered the Ort cloud, black holes and demoted poor Pluto to just a mini-planet. Mass and serial murderers roam the earth. Children carry guns to school. Weapons of mass destruction are undiscovered. I have watched buildings in New York fall to the ground in an act of terrorism my mother never would have imagined ever to happen. Oh yeah, and the Blackhawks take the Stanley Cup. Who would have seen that happening?
It has been eventful, to say the least. The good thing about all of this change is that you never really feel it. It does not come all at once and hit you like a broadside accident. It is sneaky, and doles itself out in tiny amounts. If you had it all happen at once, you’d overload. But when you think about what has passed in your lifetime, it astounds you and makes you marvel at the whole parade you have had some small part of. That and the fact that it is fun to see the look on some kid’s face when you tell him there was a time that you had to manually change the channels on the television. Yeah, no remotes back in the day just a designated channel changer.
I have reviewed who shared this birthday with me. Joe Montana. Gene Wilder. Hugh Laurie. Donnie Van Zant. The fabulous Vanityfair. Good company, if you ask me. On this date Troy was sacked, the only successful breakout from Alcatraz prison occurred, and Henry the VIII married Catherine of Aragon. I ask myself, was it as hot then as it was on the day I was born. I doubt it.
On my personal level I have managed to graduate from college, marry, divorce, get hired, get fired, been shot, been robbed, owned more dogs than I needed and survive it all. I have discovered that one marvelous thing has developed in my later years. I like myself a bit more than I did than used to. Oh, I can cry over the injustices that have happened, and get a bit riled up over things. I am still my toughest critic. I seldom need anyone to tell me what I am doing wrong since I all ready have come to that conclusion. But on the whole, I am happier with me these days than I was when I was twenty, or thirty or even forty. I can live in my skin much easier than I used to no matter how much more wrinklier it is. If that is the biggest benefit to growing older, I will take it. It is so much easier than how I used to live.
I have checked the weather for tomorrow. Alas, it will be hot but not nearly as hot as my birthday in Chicago. A bit strange that Fla will not offer me the same nasty heat that my hometown bothered with. I have requested a chicken be BBQ’ed in my honor. Some cole slaw and pasta salad will be served. I may squick all out by eating some beets and cottage cheese. That always turns a head or two. I have nothing else planned other than to answer the phone calls from family that will be coming in. It will be then that I will hear the story again from my siblings on the hottest June 11th in the history of Chicago. Now they will recount how our parents worked in the field before going to the hospital. How I was born around noon. I will hear all about the dumping of the radishes and how radishes were good money back then. They heard the stories too, you know.
It is nice to know that no matter how much things have changed over the past fifty-six years, I can still count on some things staying the same. I like that.
...CHICAGO... June 11, 1954: A STRONG HEAT WAVE HIT MUCH OF NORTHERN ILLINOIS. CHICAGO HAD A HIGH TEMPERATURE OF 97 DEGREES...STARTING AN ELEVEN-DAY RUN WITH TEMPERATURES 90 DEGREES OR HIGHER. TWO HIGH TEMPERATURE RECORDS WERE SET DURING THE ELEVEN DAY PERIOD.
This was how I came into the world. The hottest freaking June 11th in the history of Chicago. Each year I would be reminded by my father of this fact. He would turn on WGN to see the weather and point to the screen as the records for the day were broadcast.
“Yeah,” he would recount. “It was a hot one. Your mother and I were bunching radishes that morning when she told me to take her to the hospital. We made it to Ingalls just in time too. You were born right around noon. I had to dump all the radishes we had bunched that morning. Didn’t go to South Water Street that night. Too bad, radishes were good money then.”
It is the sacrifice that a father who runs a truck garden made when a child was born, I suppose.
I am amused this evening even after all these years of my father’s remembrance of the day. I will admit that at the time I was a bit aggravated at the retelling of my hottest day of the year birth. However, time has softened my hardened and be it younger view. Then again, I think that is what time does for a person. Your memories become more septa colored, the negative aspects disappear and you are left with what you want to have stored in your brain cells. It is a wonderful ability I have just recently begun to enjoy. It is not re-writing history, just editing it a bit.
I have started to reflect on the 56th year of my life with some whimsy. There is little to say about the date at this point. Fifty-six is not a milestone year like others. At twenty-one you are legal to drink. At thirty you need to get your life in gear. At forty you have to decide what it is you really want out of life. At fifty the insult of receiving your first AARP birthday greeting is beyond comprehension. At fifty-five you can qualify for senior citizen discounts at several stores and eateries. But at fifty-six there is nothing important or special to mark the occasion. I just receive the reminders that sixty is now only a few short years away. I have ignored most of these comments or retorted that indeed sixty is four years away and 2012 is two years away. Why worry?
I have been thinking about something my mother said years ago. She commented that she and my father had seen more technology come to pass and become part of the lives of humans than all other generations combined. I had to agree with her at the time. She had seen automobiles take over the world, television and radio become part of the home and had witnessed men walk on the moon. When she was born, horses were still used to pull milk carts through the streets of Hammond. So yes, she was right. At the time, that is.
In my life, so much has come to pass. Music has passed from being a shared experience to being a personal one. Ear buds plug the listener into their own world. I-pod. I-phones. Personal computers. Laptops. Cell phones. Cable television. Satellite television. Streamed video on computer. TiVo. Netflix. Flat screen televisions. Everything is digital, mircochipped or has a coaxial cable attached to it. Christmas lights are LED and laser lights come on key chains. Cars have computers and video screens. A box can tell me on which street to turn on. Al Gore invented the internet, Bill Kurtis discovered it and Spencer is actually using it. We have sent probes to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, landed one on an asteroid as it flew past. We discovered the Ort cloud, black holes and demoted poor Pluto to just a mini-planet. Mass and serial murderers roam the earth. Children carry guns to school. Weapons of mass destruction are undiscovered. I have watched buildings in New York fall to the ground in an act of terrorism my mother never would have imagined ever to happen. Oh yeah, and the Blackhawks take the Stanley Cup. Who would have seen that happening?
It has been eventful, to say the least. The good thing about all of this change is that you never really feel it. It does not come all at once and hit you like a broadside accident. It is sneaky, and doles itself out in tiny amounts. If you had it all happen at once, you’d overload. But when you think about what has passed in your lifetime, it astounds you and makes you marvel at the whole parade you have had some small part of. That and the fact that it is fun to see the look on some kid’s face when you tell him there was a time that you had to manually change the channels on the television. Yeah, no remotes back in the day just a designated channel changer.
I have reviewed who shared this birthday with me. Joe Montana. Gene Wilder. Hugh Laurie. Donnie Van Zant. The fabulous Vanityfair. Good company, if you ask me. On this date Troy was sacked, the only successful breakout from Alcatraz prison occurred, and Henry the VIII married Catherine of Aragon. I ask myself, was it as hot then as it was on the day I was born. I doubt it.
On my personal level I have managed to graduate from college, marry, divorce, get hired, get fired, been shot, been robbed, owned more dogs than I needed and survive it all. I have discovered that one marvelous thing has developed in my later years. I like myself a bit more than I did than used to. Oh, I can cry over the injustices that have happened, and get a bit riled up over things. I am still my toughest critic. I seldom need anyone to tell me what I am doing wrong since I all ready have come to that conclusion. But on the whole, I am happier with me these days than I was when I was twenty, or thirty or even forty. I can live in my skin much easier than I used to no matter how much more wrinklier it is. If that is the biggest benefit to growing older, I will take it. It is so much easier than how I used to live.
I have checked the weather for tomorrow. Alas, it will be hot but not nearly as hot as my birthday in Chicago. A bit strange that Fla will not offer me the same nasty heat that my hometown bothered with. I have requested a chicken be BBQ’ed in my honor. Some cole slaw and pasta salad will be served. I may squick all out by eating some beets and cottage cheese. That always turns a head or two. I have nothing else planned other than to answer the phone calls from family that will be coming in. It will be then that I will hear the story again from my siblings on the hottest June 11th in the history of Chicago. Now they will recount how our parents worked in the field before going to the hospital. How I was born around noon. I will hear all about the dumping of the radishes and how radishes were good money back then. They heard the stories too, you know.
It is nice to know that no matter how much things have changed over the past fifty-six years, I can still count on some things staying the same. I like that.