UK Soon!

I wish I had gone to London yesterday to see the ceremonies and Westminster Abbey.  It would have been a long but worthwhile day. What wonderful history I find here. I remember when I was a little girl having Veterans’  Day off from school and taking the train to Chicago and standing in silence with my mom and Granny Amy at 11 am.

South Dakota is far from any city type activities. Until we got a Borders bookstore 10 or so years ago, the closest bookstore was 365 miles away in the next biggest town. It was a long drive and often an overnite stay to go to the bookstore! Brooke Melody my daughter and I have some hilarious road stories about those trips or attempts to take trips to spend some time at the bookstore.

Often we would stop there on the way back from a visit home in Chicago, having driven 550 miles already, and saw the store as a refuge, but not for long. We were close enough to home that we could make it home if we kept on going. I remember getting some great books there, depending what I was interested in at the time, be it author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Milos Kundera, baseball, England, religion or something I heard on NPR radio.

So the point is that I miss the city. When I first got a car, I got it washed in the winter, and didn’t know the locks would freeze up and in the morning. I couldn’t get into the car at all. Living in Evanston, Illinois, I was a few blocks from the subway or elevated train as it was called there, because it ran on tracks elevated above the street in the city. Check it out on Blues Brothers or The Fugitive or any movie filmed there.

What could have been a nightmare was so great, because I ended up taking a bus to the south side of Chicago where I worked, thus driving by stores decorated for Christmas, city streets with Christmas lights, just little gifts of Christmas that I would have misssed in a car. These are the little gifts of  city life that I miss now living in the Dakotas.

So I missed the train going to London yesterday, but I end up talking about trains I caught and all the great fun it was in the city.

I can’t wait to get rid of my car. My grandparents never had a car at all, and going with them on public transportation was just the way it was, people watching and finding goodies people dropped on the train with my Grandpa Fred.

I worked on the South side of Chicago at Michael Reese Hospital Campus. That is/was in the process of being torn down for the Olympic Village that Chicago never got. It is a hospital campus a stone’s  throw from Lake Michigan. When I  worked night shifts and sat at a table at the end of the hall and watched the sunrise on the lake and the waves with the colors in them. It is a Jewish Hospital, so I had great on campus restaurants and our building, Psychiatric and Psychosomatic Institute, was so far on the fringe of the campus that  we got an hour for lunch to walk into the main campus to eat. It wasn’t that far, I was just in the right place at the right time. The food was delicious and I got all the Jewish Holidays off too. I didn’t mind feeling Holy for  some extra days there. What a fun first job. There were 5 psych units in the building and it was a teaching hospital for the University of Chicago. It is a Walter Gropius (architect) building.

The people who came in were, to get to the point, wealthy. I had nephew of some celebrities and the sister of a Playboy bunny who came to visit her. But it was the summer of Watergate. There were alot of lawyers and in those days people stayed in a psych hospital a long time. The lawyers were there for being manic depressive, and all brilliant. Probably they were wealthy and just stayed on there for a break. Anyway, they all explained the intricacies of Watergate trials to me and it was quite the summer and a great job.

The summer before that my Uncle Nate got me a patronage job in the County Building in downtown Chicago. I was a typist at the Cook County Registrar of Deeds and Records. The point is that that summer the astronauts who walked on the moon drove past in a ticker tape parade waving and smiling from their cars. What a summer. My friend Debbie and I went to the Lake on our lunch-breaks, to Buckingham Fountain, I love water.

I went to the stores on my breaks, and some raving guy started talking to me on the street and said he was a relative of Dean Martin, actually he probably said he was Dean Martin, because with a large blue permanent marker pen he wrote,’Dino Martino’ on the building, and for years it was there on the blue tile building on the side near the alley. Wierd but true, I walked past there and one day it was gone. It was a mighty scrawl he used to write that.

It is fun to remember some city happenings, there’s always something.