Lots of people have their own stories about our former Governor, here's mine:
Sunday, September 23rd, 2007 was a blue-sky day and a sports lover's dream. The Cubs were cruising, it was the last home game of the season, Zambrano was pitching, and there was a Bears game later that night. I was at Wrigley before the first pitch for a change (Kat's family's season tickets, Sec. 17, awesome seats, with lots of room in front.. like the exit row ont he airplane) with friends Heather and Kat, who in pure Chicago fashion were taking the train to Soldier Field for the Bears game later that evening. I mention this because they had bags with a change of clothes with them for round two later that day.
So as we get to our seats, our Governor, Rod Blagojevich, is on the field with his family, waving to the feisty crowd and he is getting BOOOOOED big time. I felt bad for his 2 kids. Patti looked mortified. I didn't even know what he was doing on the field (singing national anthem? couldn't find his seats?) but was quickly distracted by the Bud vendor.
Two ice cold beers-- I mean outs-- later, I was turned to Kathryn on my right when I felt someone on my left. And usually NO ONE is allowed to pass in front of our seats. Emily, our dear usher, sees to that.
And I turn and it's Blagojevich. With Patti in tow.
"Oh, HI, Rod!" I say. To the Governor.
He looks a little shocked and is trying to get by us but is tripping over the stuff at our feet.
"I see you running in my neighborhood all the time!" I continue. Which I do, with a police escort on a bike. Did.
This sort of gets his attention. He pauses and puts his hand ON KATHRYN'S KNEE.
"Well," he begins, "I had to stop running for awhile 'cause I hurt my leg." He takes his hand off Kathryn and points somewhere near his knee. "But I'm still working out, though."
Rest assured, our Governor is getting his exercise.
Cubs won that game 8-0, but you know how the rest of the season went.
It's all true.
Let me make that perfectly clear.
Friday, January 30, 2009
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Farm Cats
Near Joliet on Interstate 55, the air conditioning in our Chevy Nova at full blast,
my mom’s cigarette smoke tossed around the inside of the car, I have bitten the inside of my
cheek so much that it is raw and tastes like a penny. This is the third trip we have made to the farm this summer to visit my cousins, and my 9 year old mind is on one thing; the kitten in
the hayloft who I have named Sudsy. I am counting down the exits and working up my courage.
My mom is easier to convince than my dad, who wears a suit to work in a big building and
doesn’t like surprises.
"So, which of the kittens is your favorite again?" I ask, knowing she has already admitted,
at my prodding, that the runty tortiseshell cat is her favorite. But my mom is more of a dog
person, so this is a difficult admission. She takes a long, satisfying drag on her cigarette and looks at me sideways.
"These cats are not house cats," my mom begins again. "They’re living outside in the
winter and eating barn mice, for christssake! These cats are not like Fancy! (our aged,
docile cat at home, sleeps 23 hours a day.) So play with them all you want while we’re here, but
please wash– no, scrub– your hands when you come inside. And no more pets."
This is a clever and overused tactic by my mother, turning something exciting into a
lesson for responsibility or cleanliness. As much as I admire those rough and tumble kids who get filthy at recess, my mom has ruined this for me. But down on the farm, where my cousins Mike and Kelly and my favorite Aunt Nancy live, anything goes. The moms sit at the picnic table in the kitchen and drink out of glasses rimmed with salt that make my eyes water. Down on the
farm, Aunt Nancy has a whole cabinet of treats, including sugared cereal, Hershey’s syrup, and
pixie sticks, just to name a few.
We kids have lots of exotic activities, including go-carts on the gravel driveway, jumping
off high planks in the football field sized hayloft, and playing hide and seek in the endless rows of
corn that border the farm property. Here, I can let down my guard and really get messy by
accident instead of dirtying my knees at recess just to look carefree.
"How ya gonna keep ‘em down on the farm..." my mom sings this every time.
We drive until the houses are a mile apart. I think that this is why my mom physically
relaxes as we pull into the long gravel driveway leading up to the old farm house. As we come
around the bend, passing my favorite tall pine tree, the suburbs seem much more than an hour’s drive away. Adults like being here too, and everyone usually gets rowdy right around the time we kids head off to bed. When my mom leans over to kiss me it smells like gin and cigarettes,
familiar. Many nights I have tried to sleep in Kelly’s bottom bunk with two pillows smashed to
the sides of my face, trying to drown out the sound of Motown and my mom’s own gravelly
laugh, which is louder than everyone else’s. Usually this starts with my mom or Aunt Nancy
telling one of their famous stories, and they laugh like it just happened. Once Uncle Al, a pilot,
landed his Cessna in the front yard on a dare.
"He could lose his license," my dad said in the car on the way home . My mom rolled
her eyes and lit a cigarette.
My mom’s an animated storyteller and her favorite farm story to tell and retell was when
one of the dogs, Charlie, proudly walked up the front porch steps one steamy August night with a live skunk in his teeth. Out of habit, I opened the screen door and Charlie bounded into the living room. When Kelly screamed and ran, it scared Charlie, who dropped the skunk and was promptly sprayed. Later, while Uncle Walt bathed Charlie in tomato juice in the house’s only bathtub, my mom wandered into the kitchen and sat at the table where Aunt Nancy and I were playing cards.
"No Bloodies?" asked my mom.
"Don’t ask," Aunt Nancy said sharply, slapping her card face down. "Gin."
My cousins are jumping up and down on the front stoop as we pull into our spot on the
lawn. Although they are both younger than me (Mike by 6 months, Kelly a year and a half, a fact I reminded them of often), my cousins have talents my mom would never allow. At the age of 7,
Kelly could fix a perfect martini, drive the Impala to the end of the driveway and back by herself to get the mail, and pump gas. Mike has a BB gun and a dirt bike.
But the best thing about the farm is the animals. There’s a Mama cat, a tough as nails
marmalade beauty, who has kittens at the appalling rate of one litter per season. Not many
survive, and few are named. The three legged cat is named Stool, and one cat whose
head was knocked permanently sideways by a horse is called Ten After Six. At any given time
there are a dozen cats running around the acres of the farm. I live for the moment after dinner and clean up when Aunt Nancy lets me fill the cats’ dish with leftover scraps and a dash of Meow Mix. The cats are always waiting for me, winding around my ankles and pawing my knees as I set down the dish, while I plug my nose against the smell of it.
So after I stretch out of the car and hug and kiss and say hello to everyone, I immediately
ask Kelly, "Where’s Sudsy?"
"I was thinking of another name for her. How about Sweetie?" She asks
Mike yawns and said he was going back to finish his experiments, which seemed to
consist solely of a magnifying glass and a daddy long legs.
My mom and Aunt Nancy stand in the sharp morning sun, talking about the boring drive
and what’s for lunch.
"Let’s go to the hayloft," I say. We run, because you never walk anywhere when you’re 9.
We climb up the rickety two by fours to the hayloft, located in the big barn. The air up
here is sweet and sticky and 10 degrees warmer than outside. There is only one tiny window at
the peak of the roof, nearly 20 feet above us, so the air inside is still as water. We find some cats
in a little nest in one corner of the hayloft, snoozing in the sun. Aren’t they hot in all that fur? I
spot my grey and white kitty in the downy mix. As she sleeps her long, dainty paws twitch in the sun. I sit next to her on a hay bale and rub her exposed white belly.
She opens her yellow eyes and immediately hisses at me.
Then she bats at me with an exposed claw.
Kelly gasps as I snatch my hand away; a thread of red appears on my arm.
This is not the kitty she was a few weeks ago. There’s something weird in her yellow eyes
that creeps me out. Plus, she’s huge. I am undeterred.
We regard each other, Sudsy and I.
I lunge to pick her up and she leaps up to the highest perch, scaling the bales like a
mountain goat. Then, as Kelly and I watch, she scampers across the hay and disappears down the hole cut out in the floor where the ladder peeks up.
Kelly and I fly down the hole and the chase is on.
The dogs, Agatha Christie and Charlie, sense the commotion and get into the act, chasing
and barking at Kelly and me, while Sudsy barely stays in our sight. She maniacally runs through a farm obstacle course, over a combine, under a tractor, through the yard and straight up the skinny pine tree that is in the middle of the property. By the time Kelly and I and the dogs in tow reach the foot of the tree, Sudsy is 30 feet up. We squint into the sun and call for the cat to come down.
Sudsy turns her yellow eyes at us, hisses nastily, and runs up another 5 feet. Now she is
lost in the thick branches. We slump beneath the tree and sigh, sweaty from the ordeal. The moms watch silently as the dogs circle the tree, whining.
Other cats in this tree have not been so lucky. One was shot out of the tree like a slingshot
(clothesline tied to the Impala, a bent tree), and one was scared down by a raccoon. Sudsy retreats hours later when I come out with the scraps. I swear her tail is between her legs.
I took home the kitty the next day and renamed her Muffin. She spent a few years in
domestic bliss but never really acclimated. She was relocated to a farm in Minnesota, where she
was Queen of the Barn. She even outlived my mother, who of course was right. You can’t feed
salmon to a cat who prefers scraps.
my mom’s cigarette smoke tossed around the inside of the car, I have bitten the inside of my
cheek so much that it is raw and tastes like a penny. This is the third trip we have made to the farm this summer to visit my cousins, and my 9 year old mind is on one thing; the kitten in
the hayloft who I have named Sudsy. I am counting down the exits and working up my courage.
My mom is easier to convince than my dad, who wears a suit to work in a big building and
doesn’t like surprises.
"So, which of the kittens is your favorite again?" I ask, knowing she has already admitted,
at my prodding, that the runty tortiseshell cat is her favorite. But my mom is more of a dog
person, so this is a difficult admission. She takes a long, satisfying drag on her cigarette and looks at me sideways.
"These cats are not house cats," my mom begins again. "They’re living outside in the
winter and eating barn mice, for christssake! These cats are not like Fancy! (our aged,
docile cat at home, sleeps 23 hours a day.) So play with them all you want while we’re here, but
please wash– no, scrub– your hands when you come inside. And no more pets."
This is a clever and overused tactic by my mother, turning something exciting into a
lesson for responsibility or cleanliness. As much as I admire those rough and tumble kids who get filthy at recess, my mom has ruined this for me. But down on the farm, where my cousins Mike and Kelly and my favorite Aunt Nancy live, anything goes. The moms sit at the picnic table in the kitchen and drink out of glasses rimmed with salt that make my eyes water. Down on the
farm, Aunt Nancy has a whole cabinet of treats, including sugared cereal, Hershey’s syrup, and
pixie sticks, just to name a few.
We kids have lots of exotic activities, including go-carts on the gravel driveway, jumping
off high planks in the football field sized hayloft, and playing hide and seek in the endless rows of
corn that border the farm property. Here, I can let down my guard and really get messy by
accident instead of dirtying my knees at recess just to look carefree.
"How ya gonna keep ‘em down on the farm..." my mom sings this every time.
We drive until the houses are a mile apart. I think that this is why my mom physically
relaxes as we pull into the long gravel driveway leading up to the old farm house. As we come
around the bend, passing my favorite tall pine tree, the suburbs seem much more than an hour’s drive away. Adults like being here too, and everyone usually gets rowdy right around the time we kids head off to bed. When my mom leans over to kiss me it smells like gin and cigarettes,
familiar. Many nights I have tried to sleep in Kelly’s bottom bunk with two pillows smashed to
the sides of my face, trying to drown out the sound of Motown and my mom’s own gravelly
laugh, which is louder than everyone else’s. Usually this starts with my mom or Aunt Nancy
telling one of their famous stories, and they laugh like it just happened. Once Uncle Al, a pilot,
landed his Cessna in the front yard on a dare.
"He could lose his license," my dad said in the car on the way home . My mom rolled
her eyes and lit a cigarette.
My mom’s an animated storyteller and her favorite farm story to tell and retell was when
one of the dogs, Charlie, proudly walked up the front porch steps one steamy August night with a live skunk in his teeth. Out of habit, I opened the screen door and Charlie bounded into the living room. When Kelly screamed and ran, it scared Charlie, who dropped the skunk and was promptly sprayed. Later, while Uncle Walt bathed Charlie in tomato juice in the house’s only bathtub, my mom wandered into the kitchen and sat at the table where Aunt Nancy and I were playing cards.
"No Bloodies?" asked my mom.
"Don’t ask," Aunt Nancy said sharply, slapping her card face down. "Gin."
My cousins are jumping up and down on the front stoop as we pull into our spot on the
lawn. Although they are both younger than me (Mike by 6 months, Kelly a year and a half, a fact I reminded them of often), my cousins have talents my mom would never allow. At the age of 7,
Kelly could fix a perfect martini, drive the Impala to the end of the driveway and back by herself to get the mail, and pump gas. Mike has a BB gun and a dirt bike.
But the best thing about the farm is the animals. There’s a Mama cat, a tough as nails
marmalade beauty, who has kittens at the appalling rate of one litter per season. Not many
survive, and few are named. The three legged cat is named Stool, and one cat whose
head was knocked permanently sideways by a horse is called Ten After Six. At any given time
there are a dozen cats running around the acres of the farm. I live for the moment after dinner and clean up when Aunt Nancy lets me fill the cats’ dish with leftover scraps and a dash of Meow Mix. The cats are always waiting for me, winding around my ankles and pawing my knees as I set down the dish, while I plug my nose against the smell of it.
So after I stretch out of the car and hug and kiss and say hello to everyone, I immediately
ask Kelly, "Where’s Sudsy?"
"I was thinking of another name for her. How about Sweetie?" She asks
Mike yawns and said he was going back to finish his experiments, which seemed to
consist solely of a magnifying glass and a daddy long legs.
My mom and Aunt Nancy stand in the sharp morning sun, talking about the boring drive
and what’s for lunch.
"Let’s go to the hayloft," I say. We run, because you never walk anywhere when you’re 9.
We climb up the rickety two by fours to the hayloft, located in the big barn. The air up
here is sweet and sticky and 10 degrees warmer than outside. There is only one tiny window at
the peak of the roof, nearly 20 feet above us, so the air inside is still as water. We find some cats
in a little nest in one corner of the hayloft, snoozing in the sun. Aren’t they hot in all that fur? I
spot my grey and white kitty in the downy mix. As she sleeps her long, dainty paws twitch in the sun. I sit next to her on a hay bale and rub her exposed white belly.
She opens her yellow eyes and immediately hisses at me.
Then she bats at me with an exposed claw.
Kelly gasps as I snatch my hand away; a thread of red appears on my arm.
This is not the kitty she was a few weeks ago. There’s something weird in her yellow eyes
that creeps me out. Plus, she’s huge. I am undeterred.
We regard each other, Sudsy and I.
I lunge to pick her up and she leaps up to the highest perch, scaling the bales like a
mountain goat. Then, as Kelly and I watch, she scampers across the hay and disappears down the hole cut out in the floor where the ladder peeks up.
Kelly and I fly down the hole and the chase is on.
The dogs, Agatha Christie and Charlie, sense the commotion and get into the act, chasing
and barking at Kelly and me, while Sudsy barely stays in our sight. She maniacally runs through a farm obstacle course, over a combine, under a tractor, through the yard and straight up the skinny pine tree that is in the middle of the property. By the time Kelly and I and the dogs in tow reach the foot of the tree, Sudsy is 30 feet up. We squint into the sun and call for the cat to come down.
Sudsy turns her yellow eyes at us, hisses nastily, and runs up another 5 feet. Now she is
lost in the thick branches. We slump beneath the tree and sigh, sweaty from the ordeal. The moms watch silently as the dogs circle the tree, whining.
Other cats in this tree have not been so lucky. One was shot out of the tree like a slingshot
(clothesline tied to the Impala, a bent tree), and one was scared down by a raccoon. Sudsy retreats hours later when I come out with the scraps. I swear her tail is between her legs.
I took home the kitty the next day and renamed her Muffin. She spent a few years in
domestic bliss but never really acclimated. She was relocated to a farm in Minnesota, where she
was Queen of the Barn. She even outlived my mother, who of course was right. You can’t feed
salmon to a cat who prefers scraps.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
