Sadly, my brother Will died this week. From this point on, I guess I can no longer say I am chasing him. He was born seven years before me, and when Mom had me, I finally filled the void left by our older brother Joe. I’m sure by the time I was old enough to talk, he didn’t want any part of me. My mother probably enslaved him to watch me, feed me, change me, and whatever else a mother would use her oldest child to do for her. That might explain why he became very interested in school and in helping the nuns after school, or any activity that would excuse him from being home.
Villy-Willy-Will- Bill, Little Brother Joe, and our baby sister Maria
My recollections of Will, or Villy as Mom called him, are vague, beginning in grammar school. Our bonding time during those years was limited, and my recollections of him pushing me around the block in a buggy are nil. The gap between us seemed to stretch, growing longer and longer. When I started first grade, he was in seventh grade. When I reached eighth grade, he had finished Leo High School, the University of Illinois, and was in the army and stationed in Germany. I finally remember writing him letters when he was in Germany.
I finally finished college in 1961. By that time, Will was married, working, and raising a family. Our time together was limited to meeting at our parents’ house for birthdays and holidays. The gap between us was huge, but by then, people were calling him Bill rather than Will.
Somewhere around 1969, the gap closed. I had begun working at Panduit, and Bill was searching for a new job. At a family party, I told him to try at Panduit. Unbeknownst to me, he did. Soon after, I was sharing the lunch table with Roy Moody, VP of Engineering. I thought it strange that he wanted to know about Bill. Three weeks later, I met Bill in the hallway at Panduit. We finally caught up to each other. Bill and I worked in separate departments, but we saw each other and spoke almost daily for the next 35 years.
After suffering for three months with a torn muscle in my hip, I have finally resorted to using a painkiller and an anti-inflammatory. Even in minimal doses, my body responds positively. A couple of hours after taking a pill, I can walk without a limp and pain. It gets so good that I begin to believe that I might be curing the problem. Then the effect of the pill begins to wear off, and I am reminded about an upcoming appointment with the orthopedic surgeon.
The MRI I took last week showed a tear in one of the components surrounding the hip joint. I have to believe it will take some surgery to correct the problem. I have strained my memory to recall what caused this injury, and am beginning to conclude it happened during a specific exercise while doing physical therapy to build up my leg strength. Now, I conclude that all the benefit of eight weeks of PT has been erased by my desire to do things like tie my shoes, pick things up from the floor, and to walk distances again.
Looking back seventy-two years points me to the polio that I had as a teenager. The muscle that is currently giving me problems happens to be one that was affected by the polio virus. My right hip was severely paralyzed and required primary therapy and exercise to build up. I used crutches for a year before my leg was strong enough to let me walk without a gimp. Well, the gimp is back and the pain at times will shoot up though my hip into my shoulder and down to my knee. I have self diagnosed myself with Post Polio Syndrome. It happens to people who had polio as a teen and after forty years of using affected nerves and muscles. I look upon this as a positive thing because I didn’t recognize the problem until this year which is thirty-two years after many polio-people first experience the phenomenon.
I see this as a problem I successfully dealt with once before, and I can do it again, but it will take much more effort.
If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be? That is a question I have asked myself for the past seventy years, and I still don’t have an answer other than right where I live now.
There is something about living where you were born that seems to establish a tap root that is hard to pull up. All my life, I have traveled to places that I thought were better than where I live. It all began when my wife Barbara and I were on our honeymoon. First of all, the honeymoon was our very first trip away from home. Our destination was Florida. We loved the Florida weather along the Atlantic Ocean. What we didn’t like about Florida were the yearly hurricanes. The following year we ventured to California via Volks Wagon Bug. The smog in the Los Angeles area discouraged us from moving there, although I did go on a job interview with an airplane manufacturing company. One look at their engineering department turned me off. It was a giant room the size of two WalMarts back to back with rows and rows of drafting tables staffed by white shirted engineers designing parts. Up to that point in time, I yearned to live in LA and work for an engineering firm. The sight of that room caused my brain to lose the idea of working there forever.
On our way northward from LA, I aimed the Bug toward San Francisco, playing Tony Bennett’s latest hit song,
The loveliness of Paris seems somehow sadly gay The glory that was Rome is of another day I’ve been terribly alone and forgotten in Manhattan I’m going home to my city by the Bay I left my heart in San Francisco High on a hill, it calls to me To be where little cable cars climb halfway to the stars
The morning fog may chill the air, I don’t care My love waits there in San Francisco Above the blue and windy sea When I come home to you, San Francisco Your golden sun will shine for me
When I come home to you, San Francisco Your golden sun will shine for me
We never stepped into San Francisco to see what everyone was singing about. Our itinerary was closing, and we had to move. However, the Bug topped out at 65 mph and needed to be goosed on the uphill segments, which were numerous. My last great vision was of Lake Tahoe before we called it quits in Reno, Nevada. Crossing Nevada was joyless. Just straight roads with endless hills between barren mountains.
As a young family, we enjoyed visiting Michigan, especially along the western coast of Lake Michigan, and we spent many weekends visiting my parents on their farm. We could have lived there, except that the winters are as brutal as those in Illinois. After many trips to the western states, we changed direction and headed east toward the Atlantic Ocean. The one thing I noticed is an abundance of dark green forests and lots of hills. What I didn’t experience is a driving force to want to live in the highly populated eastern part of our country.
After my son moved his family to Texas, I got to tour his state more extensively. The central part of Texas, with its hills and lakes, is beautiful and could convince me to live there.
We decided to treat ourselves on our anniversary by visiting Hawaii. There is no doubt, I could live there on any of the islands, but the Big Island was where I’d want to settle, even though we had the most fun on Maui.
Later, Barbara and I began traveling to Europe. Our first tour was to Britain, which consists of England, Scotland, and Wales. Those places are nice to visit, but they are not for me. My work took me to Germany several times, and I fell in love with the countryside and the small villages scattered throughout the country. I studied German in high school and could speak a few words, but the language would prohibit me from living there. On one of those business trips, my boss planned a visit to our factory in Avenzano, Italy. We spent all of twenty-four hours there, and I fell in love with place.
Throughout my travels, I have never been able to decide where to live next. Each time we visited somewhere, it was during an ideal time. For instance, we saw Hawaii during the summer, but never during the rainy season. The same held for Singapore. Canada is great during the summer months, but it is snowy and cold for the rest of the year. Iv’e never been to Alaska so I can only guess that living in six months of darkness would make me go crazy.
The choices of where to live are endless, and there is always a downside to every place I have ever considered to become my home. And I have always decided that I have a little bit of everything I have seen in the world, so why not just stay here in Illinois.
In conclusion, I have decided that at my age, the next place I want to live is Heaven.
When Jacque was born, we placed her in a crib that had formerly belonged to her brother, Steve, who was born eleven months ahead of her, and that is the instant she became his lifelong competitor. She must have received his vibes from the mattress. Throughout her life, she competed with Steve—anything Steve did, she had to do too. Never once in her lifetime did we set a challenge vocally. This competition lasted through grammar school, high school, and college. She finally beat him by getting a master’s degree in nursing.
Throughout her lifetime, she was never satisfied with her personal achievements. Near the end of her grammar school years, she picked up a love for the Spanish language. One year, when she was about fourteen, she bugged Barb and me to allow her to attend a two-week language camp in Minnesota. Eventually, she broke us down, and we let her attend. I remember we put her on the airplane and came home with tears in our eyes. She came home two weeks later speaking Spanish. From the time she got off the plane in Fargo, North Dakota, near the Minnesota border, she was required to speak only Spanish until she returned home, and we insisted that she talk to us in English. It was during this period that she joined a pen-pal program and began writing to a young man from Spain called Juan Carlos. As far as I know, they are still at it.
When she was fourteen, her mother, Barb, was diagnosed with breast cancer. That is when she began working in a nursing home. A year later, she set her goal to become a cancer nurse. After proving to me that she had been accepted to the University of Illinois, she decided to attend St. Xavier University, which is located three miles from home. She became a nurse, and her first job was at Resurrection Hospital in Niles, IL. About a year later, she found a position as a nurse in the stem cell research program at Rush Hospital in Chicago. By that time, she had enrolled in the master’s program at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb. She worked at Rush full-time and commuted to DeKalb for classes. After a semester of that stress, she decided to quit work and attend school full-time until she completed her degree. Barb and I traveled to DeKalb to witness our baby girl get her master’s degree in nursing.
Somewhere in time, Jacque traveled to Spain to meet her pen-pal, Juan Carlos. They toured Europe for six weeks by car. Later, he came to America, and she drove him around our country.
She never returned to Rush but instead joined the VA Hospital in Maywood. There she was in her element, taking care of cancer patients. One of her notable memories was to accompany a seriously ill vet to Washington, D.C., by private air ambulance to visit the Vietnam War Memorial. She had a knack for comforting vets dying from cancer.
It was at the VA that Jacque met her lifelong friend and travel companion, Kelly. The two of them visited New Zealand, Australia, Japan, and other countries along the way. On one trip, she was to meet Kelly in Tokyo on their way to visit her cousin Claudia, who was stationed with the Navy in Okinawa. Somewhere over Canada, her airplane lost an engine and rolled on its side 90 degrees before the pilot was able to correct it. She was grounded in Anchorage, Alaska, for three days while a replacement engine was air freighted and installed. Eventually, she hooked up with Kelly and Claudia to tour Okinawa.
In 1990, I was still working at Panduit when my boss presented me with a challenge: go to our division in Singapore and teach them how to maintain our cable tie molds. I had previously turned down this challenge, but I finally decided to accept it. I made the trip three times over the next eighteen months. On my last trip, I asked Barb to join me at the end of the three-week stint so that we could take a vacation together in the far east. She was reluctant to travel so far by herself. She talked Jacque into traveling with her. It turned into a great time. Jacque brought Barb to me, and the three of us traveled together to Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Hong Kong. Without Jacque, I would never have had this time with Barb.
To this day, I don’t know precisely how Jacque met her partner, Jeff, but I’m sure he can tell the story better than I could. All I can add from this point is that she got lucky when she found him. Together, they were a match made in heaven. Her desire to travel waned from then on as she accepted the new challenges of marriage, motherhood, work, and pursuing her PhD. The doctorate was put on hold so she could fight the cancer. In the end cancer beat her.
Living pets are famous for adding comfort into a life. My pet is a boarder in my house. She doesn’t belong to me, but to my step grandson. Her name is Katusha. Jet black with yellow eyes and a tail that never sleeps. It amazes me as to how she can keep that tail in a vertical mode and make it curve at the same time.
Katusha was adopted as a kitten and born under the deck of my step-son Freddie to a feral mother seven years ago. Freddie was killed in an accident shortly after, and his son, Gerry, inherited the cat. To make this story longer, my step-grandson, Gerry, and the cat now live with Lovely and me.
The cat has lived indoors the entire time. The only outdoor action she gets is when she sits at a window staring face to face with a squirrel or gazing at the birds feeding at a feeder. Last month when the night time temperatures began to drop, she surprised us by allowing a mouse to enter our living space. This can’t be I told her. You are supposed to keep our home mouse free. After that incident, I began watching her night time behaviour. Lovely has a habit of opening windows and doors to allow fresh air into the house. One evening I noticed the sliding door opening to our deck was cracked open about two inches. At the base of the door she sat in a crouch with her nose aimed, her ears up, radar-eyes wide open at a teensy-tiny hole in the corner of the door. About an hour later I turned from my computer to look at the front door and noticed Katusha sitting at attention and staring at the floor in front of her. I saw something lying there, but didn’t recognize what is was. Curiosity got me out of my chair to investigate. I had to get down on my knees to see it clearly. My eyes focused and by gosh it was a mouse; One of the smallest I have ever seen. It was dead and clearly delivered by Katusha for me to examine.
I have a habit where, when I get up to stretch or move, I say, “I’m changing chairs.” The final chair is the sofa in front of the TV. Within minutes of my plopping into that chair, Katusha arrives to join me. She jumps up, turns 180 degrees, and points her ass right at my face. She wants a back scratch which I give her and then grab her and pull her into my thigh where I can stroke her cheek and neck. We do this for a few minutes before she gets bored and changes position by moving to the far end of the sofa, away from me and settles into the fuzzy throw blanket I keep there for my warmth. She will be my close friend until Gerry comes home from his job. She hears the garage door open and immediately goes to sit at the door to greet him.
