Senator’s return to work sparks memories of great uncle

U.S. Sen. Mark Kirk returned to work today, an impressive act for a man who suffered a major stroke a year ago.

Kirk, 52, represents Illinois. I’m not exactly a fan of Kirk’s or politicians in general, but I’m interested in his recovery.

For a while, I was irked that Kirk could be absent from his job representing me and the other residents of Illinois while he underwent multiple surgeries and months of rehab, but as I reflected, I’m glad he can retake his place in the Senate. If he were a school custodian, I would want the district to offer him his job back, so why not a politician?

His condition reminds me of my great uncle Art, who suffered a stroke in the mid-60s before I was born. I remember nothing of a man who must have been strong and effective as a life-long farmer in north central Minnesota except his halting walk and garbled speech. He and his wife, Great Aunt Freda, were frequent guests around our holiday table because Art was my grandfather’s brother and Freda was my grandmother’s sister (yes, the pair of brothers married a pair of sisters).

Great Uncle Art used a four-pronged cane to get around, on which I read Mark Kirk also depends. To tackle the 40-some steps of the Capitol, as Mark Kirk did today, would have been impossible for Great Uncle Art, I believe.

Art farmed when he was struck down by his stroke. My dad tells me my uncle and grandfather took over Art’s cows and chores for a while until it became apparent Art would never be able to farm again.

Art lived for nearly 20 years after his stroke. He scared me as a child because I couldn’t understand a word he said; I’d like to think I as an adult would be more kind to him. Dad said Art was most articulate when he swore, which he didn’t do much before his stroke, probably because he was frustrated with his state. Nowadays, Kirk likely benefits from better stroke medications, better rehab and a senatorial staff of dozens.

In any case, Mark Kirk gets points for perseverance. Great Uncle Art was nothing if not indomitable to endure his weakened condition for nearly two decades.

Kirk’s return to Congress also is heartening for its symbolism. The Republican was greeted at the Capitol steps by Illinois’ Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin and Vice President Joe Biden (read the Chicago Tribune’s story here). If only Congress as a whole could share that perseverance and nonpartisan support.

Angels among us

In church sanctuaries across the nation this afternoon, children gathered to retell the Christmas story. Their adorable recitations and merry music concluded, no doubt, with “Silent Night” or possibly “Go Tell It On the Mountain.”

It’s one of those traditions some parents might dread, but as a woman who never had a toddler of her own, I cherish those occasional shows I’m blessed to attend. I enjoyed seeing my 4-year-old nephew don the gear of a shepherd and my 9-year-old nephew wear an angel’s glittery halo as quiet and confident fifth-graders (it’s always the fifth graders) recite Luke’s version of Jesus’ birth story.

But I’m sure I wasn’t the only person in America whose heart filled her throat when the fidgety pre-schoolers sang “Away In A Manager”

Bless all the dear children in thy tender care,

And take them to heaven to live with you there.

I don’t know what sort of faith community Newtown, Conn., is, and I have no idea if those 6- and 7-year-olds who lost their lives on Friday would have had parts in a Christmas program today, but I thought of those children this afternoon as I watched my nephews perform, dressed in their Sunday best, and I said a little wordless prayer.

Let there by peace on earth

And let it begin with me.

Jingle blocks, jingle blocks

It isn’t Christmas with my nephews without LEGOs.

Fire station tour was a hit

Sometimes the best sightseeing is next door.

My 9-year-old nephew Logan is dressing as a firefighter for Halloween. My Beloved overheard this, and he got on the horn (as we sometimes say in our family) with one of our neighbors who just happens to be the fire chief in town. Five minutes later, we had a tour scheduled at the Hampshire fire station.

A couple of days ago, we went to the Field Museum on downtown Chicago. We drove to the train station. We rode the train to Union Station. We caught a bus to the museum. We had to stop for lunch just to refuel, it took so long to get to our destination.

To get to the fire station, we put on our tennies and walked less than mile in the bright autumn sunshine to get there. And we got such a great personal tour!

We saw so many things! An ambulance (complete with lights and siren!), an engine, a ladder truck and more. We saw where the fire fighters eat and sleep. We learned a ladder truck costs $1 million. And little Logan even got to dress in a fire fighter’s gear.

“Wow! This is heavy!”

Then we walked home. No crowds, no traffic. What a great day!

Absence makes the dog lover’s heart grow fonder

Chloe, the wonder dog. I wonder what she’s thinking.

She’s a sun worshiper, but she’ll never get burned.

My 8-pound miniature schnauzer has this adorable little habit of frolicking around on her back in the sunshine. Twist and turn, this way and that, as if she’s scratching an itch. Lately, she does it in the rare patch of green grass in our back yard, but here she’s doing it in one our big purple living room chairs.

I miss my little doggy so I dug this photo up from the archives. She’s been staying at my mother-in-law’s house this week while we traveled around in the Jeep with the open windows. As we transported her to Grandma’s house, I was terrified she would jump from my arms to the skull-crushing pavement; it was too stressful, so I’m glad we left her behind.

But I miss her and her wheezy little snooze by now.

Big birthday, little moments, good day

Well, the AARP card arrived in the mail about 10 days ago. My Beloved likes discounts, so he was actually excited about that.

Beyond that, his 50th birthday was celebrated rather quietly, without a black balloon in sight. No surprise parties, Sage, or restaurant soirées, Sheena, and I loved the concept of a limo (thanks, Wyrd) and a special album of wishes from friends (brilliant, Katharine), but I should have been soliciting ideas two weeks ago or two months ago, not two days ago. Instead of interesting beers, Frank, my husband got a big bottle of wine (from his mother), an obscene birthday card (from his uncle) and a Carhartt jacket (from me).

If nothing else, I’m an excellent procrastinator.

He enjoyed breakfast with me, lunch with his mother (and me) and dinner with his daughter (and me — I ate well today, even though it wasn’t my birthday!). “Happy birthday” was sung five different times to him. The highlight was when the waitress dimmed the lights at the sushi restaurant at dinner, and the sushi chef brought out a sculpted orange lighted with a candle and sang “Happy Birthday” a la “Deck the Halls” in “A Christmas Story” (fa, rah, rah, rah, rah …). Tyler laughed so hard! It was better than any fancy cake or elite choir.

It was a happy moment. And I guess, or hope, that’s all that counts.

Happy birthday, Beloved!

When I saw ‘how to make a car louder’ on the search history of my iPad, I should have known this was coming

Hanging around with an 18-year-old young man introduces me to a lot of concepts out of my comfort zone.

Like exhaust tips.

Yeah, I didn’t know what exhaust tips were either.

If you’re a motorhead, you’re rolling your eyes right now, but I’m not a motorhead. My stepson is though.

He’s the one who is earning money this summer changing people’s oil at Valvoline Instant Oil Change. And every spare cent from his paychecks is going into his car.

He took a few days off to visit us this weekend, and he made full advantage of his dad’s know-how and tools to improve his exhaust system.

Well, “improve” in his view.

It’s a lot louder, that’s for sure. “It’s insane,” he says, as I recorded a video on his phone for him to send to one of his Valvoline friends.

I’m interested in how my car sounds, too, but I’m usually looking for quieter, not louder, and when it starts popping when I rev it, it’s time to call the mechanic.

Not that I ever rev my engine.

In any case, the tinkering required new exhaust tips. Here’s Cas modeling them:

Caswell’s double EEs (two exhaust tips, silly!).

OK, exhaust tips are not a mansiere. This heretofore-unknown-to me-automobile accessory is the showy end of an auto’s exhaust system. On his car, they come in pairs.

They even look good in the rain.

They’re insane all right.

What a perfect haystack means

Symbols remind us of what’s important. A wedding ring symbolizes a commitment. A lushly green, well-watered lawn symbolizes suburban perfection. A signed baseball symbolizes a brush with fame.

For my uncle, a perfect haystack symbolizes a summer’s work.

A meaningful stack of North Dakota hay, circa 1965.

I recently found a black-and-white picture of the haystack in my uncle’s collection of personal photos.

“You’ve had this photo for 40-some years,” I said. “There must be a reason you kept it so long.”

“That hay stack represented a finished job,” Uncle Lee said. “I don’t get many ‘finished jobs’ in my line of work now.”

Nowadays, making hay is highly mechanized. Round bales, created by a machine, dot the rural landscape around the little town where I live on the outskirts of Chicago.

But a century ago, hay was cut with scythes and moved with pitchforks, and haystacks shaped like little houses were fixtures of the Midwestern landscape. Square balers mechanized the process in the 1940s. As the farming industry moved to a more corporate operation in recent years, large round bales have become more common.

The biggest advantage of small square bales like those handled by my uncle is that they can be moved by one person without a lot of machinery.

Square hay bales must be stacked in such a way as to shed moisture and prevent rotting. My uncle estimates his haystack probably had 2,000 square bales in it.

“I probably handled those bales six times each,” he said. “That’s why I was in such great shape! The knees wore out of my blue jeans from hiking up those bales. I could throw them like you couldn’t believe.”

As the saying goes, you make hay while the sun shines. One has to cut it, rake it and bale it first. “Dad [my grandfather] had a brand new baler at the time,” Uncle Lee remembers. “Then I’d go out and put ’em in six packs — that’s the first time I handled ’em. Then I’d pick ’em up and throw ’em on the hay wagon (that’s two), then stack ’em again on the wagon (three), bring ’em home, throw ’em down (there’s four, right?), then stack them like you see here in the picture.”

The stack in that picture symbolized a whole summer of work.

“Wait, that’s five times, I think,” I said.

“Then in the winter time, you have to feed the cattle – I had to throw the bales on the ground for the cows.”

Six.

“I like everything about cattle,” said Uncle Lee, who grew up and made hay in the western plains of North Dakota. “I enjoyed that part of farming. I didn’t like seeding or combining, but one of my favorite times of year was when we moved the cattle to summer pasture. All winter, they were cooped up in the barnyards, but in spring we moved them to the open fields. They were like little kids! They’d kick up their heels and hit their heads together, they were so happy.

“I still like cattle.”

Early on, Uncle Lee left farming because there was no money in it and embarked on a career in education. He started out as a social studies teacher. Now, he’s a school administrator – the top of the stack, so to speak – in a small, rural school district in Wisconsin.

Lee in 1965.

“That’s probably why I prefer rural districts,” Uncle Lee said. “North Dakota built my foundation. It was a hard place to make a living: It’s got a short growing season. It’s colder than hell. Sometimes it doesn’t rain. It can be a very lonely, lonely place.”

But he learned what hard work can accomplish.

And the picture of his haystack symbolizes it.

Colorful distraction

Every year about this time, I have to force myself to walk past the school supplies displays that dot the Big Box stores I frequent.

This year, I succumbed to the undeniably colorful lure of a new box of crayons.

I bought a box for my 8-year-old nephew.

Not only did the box have such delights as mauvelous and wild strawberry, it had a bonus: A free invitation to Crayola’s StoryStudio which promised to convert photo portraits into cartoon characters.

The project kept my nephew occupied for about five minutes, which isn’t bad for a toy you can’t plug in, but it seems you get what you pay for. The free StoryStudio didn’t really turn a photo into a cartoon — it offered a catalog of attributes (eyes, eyebrows, mouths, chins) to puzzle together into a character that looks sort of like you.

I’ve always said I had cartoon-like eyes. Here’s the proof.

This is what I got in the Haunted House storyline — me, about to be nabbed by a scary alien. Not to give away the ending to the coloring book, but the alien turned out to be a not-so-scary friend in costume at a Halloween party.

Do not ask me what the yellow green vapor is. It wasn’t identified in the story. That’s probably the scariest part.

‘That’s My Boy’ sinks to a new low (but, um, it made me laugh … sort of a low-pitched chuckle, maybe a bass guffaw)

We celebrated Father’s Day by going to Adam Sandler’s “That’s My Boy” with my 17-year-old stepson, Caswell.

I see my Beloved in so many of Caswell’s traits: his confidence, his salesmanship, his enormous hands, his love of cars (by the way, we have a new one in the driveway — this one without an operational motor — but that’s another post for another day). Caswell is an extrovert like his father, and this introvert just clicks with them.

So it was a treat to spend the week, culminating in Father’s Day, with Caswell, who now lives in Minnesota with his mother.

Despite the rotten-tomatoes reviews, enjoying a movie titled “That’s My Boy” with a man and his boy on Father’s Day seemed so, well, apt.

That is, until I described the plot for my mother this morning (I’d mention there’s a spoiler coming, but this movie is already a bit, um, spoiled).

“Well, it’s about a 13-year-old boy who has sex with his teacher and fathers a baby and how he reunites with his son 30 years later. Oh, and the son’s fiancée has sex with her brother. So … I guess it’s about a sex crime and incest.”

“What!” my mother said. “You took your son to that?!”

“Um, yeah,” I said, mentally recalling the R-rating and Caswell’s age, though tender, was legal. “He thought it was hilarious.”

“What?!” my mother said again.

“Well, it’s a comedy,” I said, quickly adding, “but I explained how inappropriate it is and all that.”

Well, it is a comedy, and I did laugh out loud. But it’s also wildly inappropriate; Adam Sandler’s character is holding a different beer in every scene, and that’s just not funny. But in parts, the movie was funny in an envelope-pushing way just like “There’s Something About Mary,” “The Hangover” and “The Dictator” which we enjoyed with Caswell a couple of weeks ago. Shocking scenes inspire laughter, and modern filmmakers exploit that.

It’s a pattern with us. I remember watching “Knocked Up,” a comedy about an odd couple who gets pregnant after a one-night stand, which we watched with Caswell when he was, um, 14.

OK, maybe I’m a terrible parent. Maybe I’m just encouraging Hollywood to continue to churn out more tripe. Maybe my funny bone is made of the same stuff as the common rabble who shop at Wal-Mart and dine at McDonald’s.

So maybe I need to add some high-brow activities to the list of things to do the next time we visit Caswell. A concert? The theater? Maybe a baseball game (sport of scorecard-keeping gentlemen)?

I don’t know. Is “noble” or “classic” worth sacrificing “hilarious”?

Hm, maybe I’ll just avoid telling my mother about it.