A Beautiful Sunny Day

Posted on 30/10/2025 by Grumpa Joe

Today, turned into something remarkable. I was rolling around in bed trying to find a spot where my hip wouldn’t hurt when Lovely appeared and shook me awake. “Don’t you remember that you promised to take me for my blood test this morning at nine?”

“Okay, okay,” I answered, “I thought you were only kidding.” I rolled over my aching hip and out of bed. We were on our way at 9:06 a.m. Before we left, however, she weaseled me into taking her to the last Farmer’s Market of the year in LaGrange, IL. One of her girlfriends has been bragging about this market all summer long, and she reasoned, since we are going to Blue Island this morning maybe we could swing by and see what Aldona has been talking about. The hip pain must have affected my brain, because I reluctantly agreed to take her.

The Cook County Health Clinic in Blue Island is about thirty miles closer to home than her doctor’s office in downtown Chicago. We pulled off the interstate and drove to Western Avenue in Blue Island. I turned onto Western and spotted an open parking space, so I took it. Previous experience had taught me that if I saw something within one block of the clinic, I should seize it. If I hadn’t, I would have wound up circling the blocks of narrow crowded side streets for ten minutes looking for an opening.

The sun shone brightly, and it was a balmy fifty degrees without a wisp of wind. We enjoyed the one-block walk to the clinic. A pleasant young lady security guard, all of four-feet-ten tall, guided us to where we needed to go. I wondered if she was carrying a weapon; it might have explained why she looked as wide as she was tall. The lab was in the basement of this three story brick building every floor of which was dedicated to various diseases. The elevator opened to a miraculously empty waiting room. As we sat waiting another elderly couple arrived. A tall black man pushing a short fat black lady in a wheel chair. I noticed how attentive he was to her needs. For some reason which I will not argue with the old couple were called in first. We sat and watched for our turn to come up. The lab door opened and the elderly couple exited but stopped. The old man helped the lady out of the wheelchair and then stood behind her. She stood hunched slightly forward holding a plastic cup and stared at the door in front of her. Her eyes were fixated on the door, but she looked as though any movement of air would have knocked her down into a face plant with the floor. Finally, she stepped to the door and grabbed the door knob. She successfully entered the rest room to donate her urine for testing.

Lovely got called next, and as I waited, the old man wheeled over, parked the wheelchair, and sat next to me. I noticed he wore a sweatshirt monogrammed with “SJC Basketball.” I leaned over and asked him if his shirt referred to Saint Joseph’s College. He looked at me, stunned. “Yes, it does?”

“What year were you there?”

He laughed and said, “No, I didn’t attend; my daughter did. She graduated in 2017.” I explained that the reason I asked is that I attended school there in 1956-57. In the next ten minutes, we became fast friends as we shared some tales about the school. His daughter was on the SJC basketball team all four years she attended. He told me he drove the hundred miles to watch every home game while she was at school. Her graduating class of 2017 was the last year the school existed.

We discussed how schools have changed over the years. “There was a time when men were restricted to the lobby of a women’s dorm, then when my youngest daughter attended the University of Illinois, men and women shared rooms on the same floors.” I told him that when I started at Saint Joe’s, it was a coed school. There were 780 men and one girl. Finally, the restroom door popped open, and the little lady shuffled out, looking like she would fall on her face the whole time. That’s when he told me that she was his older sister and that she was ninety-seven years old, he was eighty-eight. That is when I went into shock. He was a year older than me but much more spry and younger looking.

We arrived at 53 LaGrange Road at 11:00 a.m. The farmer’s market circles the city hall. The street-level municipal parking lot was jammed, and I was forced to use the three-story garage. I finally squeezed into a space at the 2.5 level. The market was well-attended, and many vendors were still selling. Most of the stalls hawked food, honey, soap, and doughnuts, but there was one farmer with fresh vegetables. Lovely and I split up because I had to take a call from my son-in-law. He reported that my daughter’s conditioned worsened from yesterday on her birthday when we visited and he was forced to up her morphine to give her relief. She has been fighting brain cancer for ten years and has run out of treatment options, and is now in hospice care.

Just like that, my beautiful sunny day darkened.

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Batting 1/3

Posted on 19/11/2023 by Grumpa Joe

Last Friday, I stood outside on the driveway chatting with my grandson as he added fluid to his sacred diesel pickup truck. Suddenly, I heard a familiar noise coming from above. I saw the vee formation of a gaggle of Sandhill Cranes flying past high overhead. Their distinctive noise identified what they were. They are often misidentified as Canada Geese because of their flight pattern. I called Lovely out, too, so she could also see them. She saw them, but being vision impaired, she didn’t really understand what I was getting excited about.

Later, she and I went for a brief walk, and I told her that we would see the birds the next day. Again, she didn’t understand what I told her, but she knew we would drive to Indiana. We left at ten the following day to go to Jasper-Pulaski Wildlife Preserve in Medaryville, Indiana. Luckily, it was sunny, which made driving in the countryside enjoyable.

Even though I had used a GPS to navigate, I became a little confused when we were within two miles of the preserve and stopped at a service station for instructions. The lady I asked was accommodating and excited to talk about these magnificent birds. “I live across the road from here with my Uncle, and they stop in the cemetery behind his house. I saw a flock take off early this morning at breakfast.”

Five minutes later, we arrived at the parking lot of the viewing area. It was sunny, windy, and bitingly cold. It wasn’t lovely weather to be bird-watching in an open field. The two-story viewing stand was a short walk away, so we hiked to it to get a closer view. About a thousand birds bunched up along a tiny creek that meanders through the field. Some were standing with their heads tucked under their wings, probably sleeping, while others were pecking at the creek, searching for a snack, and still others danced about each other as though courting. Luckily, I brought binoculars, which made them closer to view. The flock was a hundred yards away from the fenced viewing area. Since it was so cold, we cut our viewing short and hurried back to the warmth of the car.

Lovely and I sat looking out through the windshield using the binoculars when three birds appeared out of nowhere and landed in the flock. Then four more came down, and the stream of arriving birds continued. I opened the sunroof and looked up into the sky, and there they were, a vast flock circling downward, then landing to join their friends. The cranes will fly as high as six to seven thousand feet, rising to twelve thousand feet to cross mountains and travel up to five hundred miles daily.

After watching the cranes land for thirty minutes, we headed out for the next leg of our day. We were only thirty miles from Rensselaer, Indiana, the home of Saint Joseph College, my Alma Mater, for the first two years of college experience. The GPS guided us through towns like DeMotte, Hebron, Roeslawn, Monon, Remington, Rensselaer, and Collegeville. All are etched in my memory from when I traveled through them to get home for the holidays. Along route 231, we passed through field after field being harvested for corn. The traffic encountered is the long thirty-foot-long dump trucks filled with corn going to the storage silos. Between the corn fields were acres and acres of solar farms and a few scattered windmills with the blades turning. Indiana’s top three crops are corn, soybeans, and electricity. Power has to be considered a crop because once the panels are installed, the rich, fertile black soil is unusable to grow anything. We, as a culture, choose electricity over feeding the world.

We entered Collegeville after passing through Rensselaer from the North. A wave of nostalgia passed over me as we approached, and I spotted the bell towers of Saint Joseph’s Chapel at the entrance to the campus. The nearer we got, the stranger things became. I expected to see at least a few of the eleven hundred students everywhere, walking, carrying books and backpacks as they crossed from buildings to the library and the dorms. It is a ghost town. I tried to enter the campus from three separate drives; all were blocked off with heavy concrete barriers like we see on the highway separating lanes. I finally found a road that took us around the back door of the campus. A public highway that encircles the campus. There is not a single car or soul to be seen anywhere. When did this college close its doors? Maybe it was because of COVID-19, but I didn’t get an honest answer until I searched for it online.

Saint Joseph’s College was founded as a private college in 1889 by priests from the Passionist Order. They formally closed the doors one hundred and twenty-eight years later, in 2017. They were in debt for one hundred million dollars, with only twenty million coming in. We all know you can’t run a business that way. Sadly, I turned around and headed for the next stop on the agenda, which was to get lunch. Before we left to visit, I figured we’d find a nice restaurant in Rensselaer, a town of 6300. I asked Garmin for suggestions and decided on Somebody’s Bar and Grill. We walked in, got one whiff of the place, and decided against it. The odor reminded us of smoke, beer, and greasy food. Our Second choice was Joan’s Kitchen, across from the courthouse. It looked nice but was closed. I spotted a sign for Interstate 65 and headed for it. We ended the trip by dining in Frankfort at a well-known, comfortable place.

My batting average for this trip is .333; birds, yes; College, no; lunch in Rensselaer, no. If I were playing Major League Baseball, I’d be paid at least half a million dollars a year with that average.

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Another Job I Cannot Do

Posted on 25/03/2014 by Grumpa Joe

It has been a week since I posted an original piece and I can’t say that I care too much. I seem to be passing through a period of laziness, and writer’s block. I had fun in the past bashing Obama at every chance, but my effort to get rid of him as president failed.  Now that I am stuck with him I have sunk into despair. I don’t care what he does, nor do I want to know. I can’t do anything about it except to vote for someone different when that time comes. So, my desire to write has waned.

Writing is a hard job, and I don’t like to work hard anymore. My writing skills were never very good, and it showed throughout my education. There were so many obstacles along the way, like grammar, punctuation, spelling, sentence structure, nouns, verbs, adverbs, pronouns, modifiers, subjects, and logical thought. There were a few instances along the way when I wrote something good and a teacher recognized me for it. Like the piece I wrote in college for Professor Will McCarthy titled the “Green Beauty.” That story related a date when I took my Irish girlfriend to her Senior prom at the Del Prado Hotel in Chicago.  The Green Beauty referred to the car I used, my dad’s 1939 four door, dark green Buick Special. The name Green Beauty came to me from a radio show I listened to called “The Green Hornet.” The Green Hornet called his car the Black Beauty. My final grade for this course was “C”.

Dad’s Buick was already sixteen years old when I used it for this date. The door hinges were worn and when a door opened it dropped a couple of inches. If one was not aware of this phenomenon when opening the door it came as a surprise. I wrote about the reaction the Del Prado doorman had when he rushed up to open the door for my date. The look on his face is something that I still chuckle about when I think about it. In fact I’m chuckling as I write this. Professor McCarthy gave me an “A’ for that story. He even read it out loud to the class as an example of good writing.

The next year another prof named Holub gave us an assignment to find a picture of a piece of equipment and to write a short paragraph describing what it was. I don’t remember what piece of equipment I selected but I described it accurately. Again, Professor Holub read the piece in class as an example of good writing. My final grade for this course was “C”.

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It came time to transfer from Saint Joseph’s College to the University of Illinois and they required transferees to take a test to decide if someone doing into the school had proper English writing skill to be worthy of the University of Illinois.  I sweat that one because the idea of taking remedial english courses gave me the willies. The day of reckoning came and I showed up at the auditorium on the south end of the quad for the test. They told us to take a seat, but to leave a space between. We were handed a little blue examination tablet with lined paper, and a list of topics. The test was to write an essay on one of the twenty topics listed. Thankfully, I remember Professor Holub’s advice to turn any topic into what it is you want to write about. I don’t remember anymore which subject line I spotted, but it triggered me to write about the morality of abortion. The words flowed, and I filled the blue tablet with what I believed to be logical and moral arguments against abortion. In today’s world I would have been thrown out of the auditorium for picking such a topic.

Several days went by before I got the news that my essay was good enough to keep me from having to take remedial english, what a relief.

Since those few times when I got lucky with my writing the need to write seriously never occurred. There were many times when I had to write reports for experiments,  but I don’t count that as serious writing. For one thing report writing almost always uses passive voice because it refers to something that was done. In writing today, when I run the grammar check, it nearly always bongs me for using past tense. It seems that using phrases like “was done” are verboten because the reader finds them hard to decipher.

One of the things I realized this week as I struggled with my writer’s block, is that I would never have been able to make a living as a writer. The idea of having to produce essay’s of value on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis scares me to death. I guess it boils down to when it is fun, the words flow, but when it is required your brain goes into lockdown.

Note:  Grammar check found seven instances of passive voice within this essay. I did not rewrite those sentences. My lab report skill is still at work today.

Filed under: Biography, Characters I knew, Education, family | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

GRAMPA JIM’S LAST DAY

Posted on 20/01/2010 by Grumpa Joe

Grumpa Joe as a Toddler

Grampa Wigh died with a cigarette burning in his hand.  The ash was nearly one inch long.  He was discovered by a friend.  The friend stopped by to pick him up, a daily routine.  They would drive the distance to Fish Corners for a beer.  Grampa would stay at the tavern all evening, nursing his one beer and smoking his Camel cigarettes.  He would spend the time socializing with the many people who came to Fish Corners for gas or groceries, or for a social outlet.

When the friend, Mr. Toth, didn’t get a response from his toot, he decided to check on Jim.  Jim was just inside the door on the daybed.  The cigarette was still burning between his fingers.  He looked asleep.  He was dead.  It was 1958 and I was at the University of Illinois in my first semester after transferring from St. Joe College.

Filed under: Biography, Characters I knew, family, Funk, grief, Jun-e-or, Memories, Warm and Fuzzy | Tagged: , , , , , , | Leave a comment »