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August 17   Our  Town

The Flying Monkey has opened on Main Street, the old movie house renovated. Next week we might go to a program--a dance theater event.  In the front of the house, seats for about 300 people; in the rear, on graduated tiers, room where about a hundred people can have a light dinner and drinks.   Downstairs now two movie viewing theaters.  Pretty nice for a town so small.  All thanks to Alex Ray, our state restaurant mogul, who started his empire in an old house in Ashland around 1974.

Also new this fall, on the university campus, a big new ice arena.  Already open, hosting community and school activities and the university hockey teams starting in a few weeks.

And at Frosties, another Alex Ray locale, a new ice cream flavor created by Brendan Monroe, "Aunt Ruth's Lemon," one of the finest ice cream flavors either of us have ever enjoyed.  Not a sherbet nor a sorbet but a real creamy ice cream flavored with fresh lemons (it seems) and just sublime.

August 18   Our Town, Dirty Water

Nasty brown water coming out of the cold water tap this morning and in the toilet.  Rusty, swampy looking stuff making you wonder what all else might be in there.  Filled up a a jar of it to take to the water and sewer office later.  This and that came up.  Few hours later, on a short walk out front, we noticed the water and sewer trucks in front of our neighbor across the street.  Then we saw a big pipe up at the hospital a block away gushing forth.  Back to the neighbors where we chatted with her and Gary from W&S.  He's only been there three years, so I told him how it has happened before, years before, often this time.  No one knows what is causing it.  Back inside I call W&S.  Very apologetic and tired of being on the phone, Maureen explains they finally found out what it was---someone at the college decided to flush the campus sprinkler system, notified no one, didn't quite know how to do it right etc etc etc.  I'm hoping the head of such things at the uni will email an apology to help town-gown bruisings once again.  So far no sign.

I asked Maureen to have my bill adjusted so I would not pay for the near hour I had spent around the house trying to flush the dirty stuff away and get a clear flow again.  Neighbor had said Gary had turned off her meter while they did that.

Maureen said, yes, I understand so I will switch you over to Melissa because she handles that.  No, no I insisted to Maureen, just write the message down on paper and hand it to Melissa when you get a chance later today.  Oh, ok, sure I can do that.

So--young people born after a certain year might not realize that we used to write messages down on paper and not just forward the caller on or text the msage.  That yearly Beloit mindset thing published today.

August 18, 2010      Madrid 1982

letter found yesterday sorting through the boxes we are unpacking

from The University of Chicago Press

January 29, 1982

Professor Robert Garlitz

c/o Sra Angelita Royo

Pesnion Maitergos

Esparteros 11 3er piso

Madrid 12 ESPANA

[now it appears online as --

Amaika Hotel Madrid

Esparteros, 11, 3º, Madrid, Spain]

Dear Professor Garlitz:

You were one of the first twenty to respond to the University of Chicago Press's offer of a free copy of our Chicago originals in exchange for your opinion of it.  I have arranged for our warehouse to send you a copy of REPRESENTATIONS AND THE IMAGINATION to you address in Spain.  Don't hesitate to le me know if it fails to arrive within a reasonable time.  I'm looking forward to reading your comments.

Sincerely,

Janet Deckenbach

Publicity Department

one of those pale blue aerogrammes that we used then.

here she is now in the staff directory online---not sure of the date--

Jan Deckenbach • Assistant Paperbacks Editor • 702-7034

PENSION MAITERGOS ON ESPARTEROS was where I first saw an Afghan person in person.  A young man, maybe 16 or 18, skin a darkish red of a sort I had never seen before, windblown looking, wild black hair probably recently and badly cropped and an expression that took your breath away----wild, stunned, shocked, as it turned out, traumatized.  He was a refugee, he had seen his whole family killed before his eyes.  At the time I did not  know by who, what was going on in his home country that he would have been in asylum somehow there in Spain.  It was the time Russia was in Afghanistan and the US was training fighters to resist them.

In the same pension there were also Cuban immigrants.  Those I had met before back home but the ones I knew, a few I could count on both hands, were decidedly upper class and highly educated.  In fact at our little state college we had a history professor who had been a young lawyer in Cuba when Castro and Ché took over and whose father was the one who most likely would have overthrown Batista had the elections transpired as should have happened before the armed revolution.  But in Madrid then in this pension we saw Cuban refugees of a lower class who were passing their days in endless boredom, waiting.  They had something to live on and enough hope or expectation that, being in Spain, they could go every day to the US embassy and apply for a visa as a political refugee.  (Maybe the Afghan fellow was doing the same thing, but he was linguistically beyond our comprehension).  Every day they would go to the embassy and ask about their visas, wait in long lines, put a ten second inquiry into a bureaucrat's tiny window, wander the streets, have a coffee again, a shot of brandy or wine, kill time, come back late to the pension, make noise, try to sleep, argue, start over again in the morning.  I think some had been there for months, trying to get to New York or Miami.

We were there trying to pinch pennies, on a sabbatical semester.  Virginia worked in the libraries, David went to kindergarten, "Santa Claus" and "Mi Escuela," where in the final pageant that closed the school year, he wore an elaborate crepe paper costume that turned him into a large evergreen tree.

August 18, 2010