Having hit the hill and the liquor store, it was time to drive the short last leg to The Hawkeye State. Coming over the big bridge above Old Man River has always been one of the highlights for me. Now that I live near the Golden Gate, have used the Brooklyn & Manhattan Bridge to commute to work, and since Vance & I have walked the top of the Sydney Harbor Bridge, you might think it would be tough to raise a “huzzah” over this dainty little structure, but it isn’t so. For me, Iowa is where I grew up in many – if not most – ways. It is where I went to high school. It is where I went from just a normal kid to a weirdo literally by entering it. I went to college there. I had my first real job there. I played house with a lady there. Many of my closest friends were made there. Crossing the bridge has some heft for me. For Vance, it was a return to the state in which he was born. Grandpa was born there , then Iowa births skipped two generations and then tagged Vance. If this has any of the cosmic importance I am assigning it, surely Vance will live long enough to see the next Iowa birth in the family two-generations down the line.
You may think I am making too much of this, but if anyone is born in Iowa and makes anything of themselves – even if they were born there and then left 15 minutes after – the state of Iowa will be asking them to participate in statewide events until they die. The poor opera singer Simon Estes achieved noteworthy things in the opera world, so he is forever condemned to be the living arts ambassador in the state. He will have to sing the National Anthem at every statewide event until God calls him home. This could be Vance’s chance to be a very big fish! Yes, it may drive him to question what the summation of his life’s work really amounts to, but hey, we all go through that at some time don’t we? If Vance makes it in photography, then this photo he took of the Disco Building right over the bridge will be celebrated like it is the second coming of the American Gothic (Grant Wood = Iowan); if that happens, you can say you saw it here first!
Before heading over to Eagle Point Park, we did a little hoofing around downtown so that we could make our way over to one of the most awesome little railroads on earth – The Fenelon Place Elevator/Railroad. I have been taking trips up and down the bluffs on this little railroad since I was a kid, and I never tire of it. I actually consider it my duty as an uncle to make sure that the youngins also get their requisite number of rides in. It was therefore most awesome to have 2 of the 3 nephews with me (my man Ben’s time will come.)
I have ridden these little mountain climbing railroads in other places – in fact Vance reminded me that he & I rode the huge one in Hong Kong together. I rode one up Lookout Mountain outside Chattanooga that was pretty cool. I just missed my chance to ride the one in LA before the soul-less creeps there shut it down. They are all pretty cool generally speaking, but I don’t think I have ever seen one in a town as small as Dubuque (which isn’t to say they don’t exist – I just ain’t seen ‘em yet.) The history of this one is that a banker in downtown DBQ hated the half-hour buggy required to get home for lunch everyday, so he built himself his own private mountain-climbing railroad. The neighbors always hung around asking for rides, so the dood decided to open it up to the public and charge dough for it. Eventually it became property of the city, and as of now I think it has been up and running for 100 years. I dug it and I am pretty sure the youngins did too.
If nothing else, you can’t beat the view from the top (the view from the casino boat is also nice, but that is for different reasons.) There are lots of nice little shops and such around the base of the railroad, but they were not quite right for the 3 of us so after going up and back down once, we decided to head out for Eagle Point Park.
For some reason, we got lost in trying to find the place. I thought by now that I would have developed a migrating birds’ sensibility in locating the place give its importance to the fam and the familiarity I have with it, but it wasn’t to be. Eventually we found it and began the long winding ride up to the top.
...never trust important shots to young nephews...
Our first destination was above the lock & dam, which is where my Grandpa Ken’s ashes were scattered. I personally have needed quite a few of the years since his death to come to grips with my feelings about Grandpa Ken. I have always loved him and have always felt loved by him. There was a moment on his death bed where I had what we both knew would be our last chance to communicate. By then he was not able to speak. He died – in part – from pneumonia, which I now know from having had it is basically like suffocating to death. I know this to be a very rough way to go, and since having had it myself, I have had to think about his last days in a way I didn’t understand them at the time. In that moment of communication, I left somewhat unclear on what he meant. I think I knew what meant but if I am right, it was the first time we had really communicated on that larger level. I felt coming from him a handing off of the baton of sorts. Naturally, he had actually done that long ago with his own children, but in this moment I think he was trying to convey to me that it was important that I not go astray from where things were heading. Hopefully you will understand how I mean this when I say that I think my grandfather was happy with where my life was heading, and in the circumstances of our family, it was important that I continue “doing well”.
...never trust important shots to young nephews...
I am kinda dancing around this because I don’t want to be misconstrued. I am the first person in the family, ever, to get a college degree. Now there are some other degrees floating around (my sister Ellie is a DOCTOR and an MBA – so please don’t think that I think my little BA in Communication is setting the world ablaze), but at the time, it was not a small thing for us to have chalked up our first degree. I know that no one achieves anything on their own. I had help, both direct and indirect. My parents got my mind aligned for college from very early on and without that, I don’t know if I ever would have gone on my own. That was a huge help. My grandpa was very supportive of my going to school. Maybe he was tickled that I ended up at the University of Iowa, but I think it was more than that. In seeing Grandpa that last time, his eyes got big and he pointed to me – making very direct eye contact. It was done in a way that I took as a mix of both pride and also of his expectation that I not waste it. I am talking in circles here because – as I said – I walked away not completely sure of what he meant. Naturally I wanted him to be saying “I am proud of you. Keep it up. I have a lot of hope invested in you.” This is what I have been telling myself he meant. It fits some of the other talks we had, but if that is what he meant, it was the most direct and personal thing that went between us.
I think about Grandpa a lot. I tell stories about him here often enough that I won’t start up another round, but he went through a lot. The man was shot up in WWII and left behind by the men in his group because they thought he wasn’t going to survive his wounds. One person eventually picked him up (ironically enough he was shot in a cemetery in Metz France trying to cross a river that was being heavily defended by the Nazis.) He spent A WHOLE YEAR in traction in the UK before being sent home to the VA outside Chicago. Like I said, that’s where he met Grandma and the rest is history. What astounds me to this day is the fact that Grandpa carried shrapnel in his legs his whole life, and it caused his legs to swell up immensely. Naturally, he was in a lot of pain – he worked on his feet, he was a bartender his whole life. I work in pain a lot too, but I don’t carry things around on my neck and back for a living (well, my immense brain sorta counts, but not really…) He stood on his swollen legs for decades so that – in his parlance – everything could be “nice” and everyone could have a few “niceties”. He did this while raising 4 children – for a stretch with me & sister Gwen & mom & dad living in their house, back when I was 4-7 – and keeping his marriage together his whole life. His children all loved him deeply. Grandma & Grandpa had their share of bitter fighting, but at the end they were back in sync, which is only fitting since they were very much in love for many years.
I go to Eagle Point Park to think about Grandpa. He was important to me and I loved him, but things weren’t one-dimensionally rosy. My grandfather was from a different time, and I think if he had come to see that I had dropped any connection to political conservatism, it might have changed his perceptions of me. I don’t know. I would like to think he would have loved me no matter what, but like I said, he was from a different time and things he believed I most decidedly do not. I don’t know what to think about that. At times I have been hard on him in my mind over that stuff. Yet, every time I have thought about that stuff, I feel like he is telling me to forget about all that stuff, and that he knew what I was about all along and it never changed anything. This is what I want to think.
As the boys and I stood above the lock, I talked to Grandpa. When I did it, I got the boys to join in a little and we got to having an open chat. Vance remembers Grandpa well enough to have an idea of who he was and how great he could be with kids. Quinn didn’t know him, but we were all in this weird little mood where we really did talk to Grandpa like he was listening, so even Quinn figured out that without the life of his Great Grandpa Ken, he wouldn’t be here, Vance wouldn’t be here, I wouldn’t be here, and no one else from his mom’s side of the family would be. Quinn is a bright young man. We all ended up sending Grandpa love from the family (his daughters knew we were visiting and told us to pass it on) and we all passed him love from us and wished him well.
About the only thing we could have done to further honor Grandpa was to go to the DBQ dog track. Someday we will, but it just wasn’t that kinda night. We needed to get going home, and the boys still needed to get some play time in at the park. While they played around I just laid there doing some birdwatching (I saw a beautiful Cardinal, a few Goldfinches, and a nuthatch klatch working an old tree pretty good…good livin’.) Eventually, the sun started making its descent which meant we needed to high-tail it out. We especially had to get going because there was one last stop we absolutely had to make on our way out of the big valley: Mulgrew’s in East Dubuque.
When yr all Oakland hard, LA tough, Brooklyn rough it is easy to laugh at the notion of a little town like East Dubuque being, as Bruce Springsteen sorta said, “(a town) where when you hit a red light you don’t stop.” Yet, East Dubuque is close. It has always been a haven for rough-n-tumble white trash. It is the wrong side of the tracks, it is the wrong side of the river. I was not interested in hanging out there for long, but I wanted to make sure my young pupils had a chance to add Mulgrews to their understanding of the ancestral lands we were visiting.
Mulgrews is a bar right near the railroad tracks and practically under the river bridge. I normally don’t bring kids into dive bars, but Mulgrews is a dive with a difference. Mulgrews is famous for awesome foot-long chili dogs. Yes, I am not a meat eater, but when traveling – especially in the Midwest on a quest of this type – an exception had to be made. My young charges needed to have their first bite of this delight as a part of their instruction. Since we had just eaten a little bit before, the goal wasn’t for each of us to get our own and finish them (I wasn’t sure we’d make it to Mulgrews while it was light out, so we ate elsewhere – we just happened to get their at dusk, allowing us to get in and out safely.) The goal was for them to simply have a bite so they could have their eyes open (and perhaps realize their nakedness – they may have…I didn’t ask.)
There was a secondary mission in our visit. I had long heard the rumor that this bar was owned and operated by the family of Kate Mulgrew, the actress who played the lady captain on one of the late Star Trek series. In the presence of the youngins, I asked the lady of the bar if indeed this was true. I was shocked to find out that it IS NOT true. While this does remove a significant amount of intrigue that surrounds Mulgrews, it ends up doing little to damage its prestige in the pantheon of Dubuque area highlights.
The lads, being tender-of-stomach as they are were a little put off by the size and general appearance of the chili-dog, and they originally hesitated to even sample the beast. I am not a tyrant, but I do know what is best for the lads, so I did insist (firmly, but lovingly) that they consume wiener. This they eventually did. I am not sure they were immediate converts since the chili is a little spicy and the dog itself has a sort of off-pink/almost-orange color to it; however, I could see that a critical mass of interest was achieved. I am confident that we will return together one day and each have a full dog a piece. This was my aim, and I believe I succeeded.
After the wiener, there wasn’t a ton left that could be done to top off the trip. We meandered our way home on US20 until we made it back to the valley of the mighty Kishwaukee River and my parent’s casa in Belvidere. We did see one small town holding a very solemn ceremony honoring one of their town’s boys who had fallen in service in Iraq. The entire football stadium was packed, and we could tell from the car – even in passing – we were going by during a moment of silence. Quinn is too young to have too deep a conversation about these matters with, so I didn’t really push it. Vance, on the other hand, is someone I would eventually like to have a chance to chat with. Whatever Vance chooses to do with his life, I will support him. My hope is that he will go straight to college and that we will all find a way to pay for it come hell or high water (read: he better get scholarships), but at 15, I can’t say for sure that he hasn’t given the military at least some cursory consideration.
I wouldn’t call us a military family, but each generation of the fam has sent someone to the service. My sister Ellie is currently at an Air Force Base down in Oklahoma, and we all couldn’t be more proud of her. I think being in the military went a long way in helping her to get her Dr. & MBA degrees. I also know she didn’t just join for the money. She is serving in part out of love for the country and because in our family, it is something that has been done for similar reasons in the past. This could be the route Vance chooses for himself. I am already very nervous at the prospect of Ellie being sent overseas to a hotter theatre (she came very close before and would go if asked I think.) The idea of Vance going in to the military 3 years from now does scare the (D)ickens out of me (it scares the later Rudyard Kipling IN to me as well…shudder.) It is his decision. I hope to have the chance to talk to him first, but he may not want to hear, and ultimately it isn’t my business – it is his life. Perhaps seeing that a young man from a nearby town has fallen on the battlefield serving the douchebag that runs this country. I hope Vance can see the full depth of the tragedy involved in the loss of that young soldier. Unfortunately, his Grandfather (my dad) has f’ing Fox News on in the house all the time, so it could end up Vance hears so much of that crap he buys in. Ooooooooooh. The notion really frightens me. Perhaps it is too soon to get too worked up about it. No way of knowing. I just don’t want to find I got worked up about it after it was too late. The idea of him dying in the place of some coward GOP voter from 2004 who could very well serve but chooses not to would end up being too much for me to take I think. Ugh. I am going off on a tangent here and there is no reason for it. Not in this entry. This entry is about a trip that was a hell of a lot of fun and it is ending up on a downer.
Actually, the way to avoid the downer is to share a few pictures from the next day. If you can believe this, my sister Karen is dating a young man (I am not kidding) who is also named Rudy. When we sat down to play Michigan Rummy at the house, there were 3 Rudy’s at the table. I wonder if that has ever happened in the history of the world until then?
Anyway, Karen, Rudy, Quinn, Vance, and I all went to Gameworks at Woodfield Mall the next day. The boys really love it there, and it is kinda fun to play games with them (I gave out serious ass-whoopins on the big racing game – coming in first and showing suckaz only my tailpipe the whole way around…just like it should be!) I would like to make fun a little bit of Quinn’s efforts on the dancing games, but it would be wrong. I did snap this shot of him being utterly befuddled by the game, but if the full truth were known, I hopped on after him and looked even MORE pathetic. These poor boys may have inherited from my dad & I a total tendency to be a dancetard. If so lads, I apologize now. There really is nothing that could have been done. Again, all apologies.
After a full afternoon of video gaming, and that after having had a full day of Dubuque/Northeastern Illinois Exploration, I can honestly say that the boys and I packed in a real wing-ding of a weekend. It certainly was up to the task of sending them off to North Carolina properly; and now, to top it all off, I find out they will be staying with my parents and going to school in Belvidere. As I said before, this is such good news on so many levels. I prayed that this might happen. Really. The thought of them going back to NC and largely being cut-off from us is hard for all of us to take. We are so used to having them in our lives in one way or another. No, we aren’t always going out on wild weekends like this, and I certainly don’t have enough time or money to fly in to Chicago to see them like this; however, I know I will be in Chicago at least a time or two a year. To get to NC to visit would be much more difficult, especially now that I live out west. When I lived in NYC while they were in NC, I did get down to see them a handful of times, but that just wouldn’t happen like that this time. In time I will get to the whole backstory that exists around all of this, but now just isn’t the time. My life (not just my stomach) has literally been in knots over their circumstances and just when I thought things were about to hit an all-time low, this wonderful thing has happened. It is too soon to put too much weight on the good feelings this has brought about, but if things smooth out from where they are now, I will feel a large weight lifted off of my shoulders.
And needless to say, there will be many more family visits to Family Liquors to come; not to mention the Mulgrew Chili-Dog Overload that would necessarily follow. Pack the Pepto and some spare undies! Happy days (I think) are here again!