Author: abendelow
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Memoir: moments of freedom, part 1
For this post, “freedom” is the sense of agency one gets when freed from external constraints on one’s choices. This freedom from allows one the freedom to–to choose one’s course in a universe where “free will” is ultimately an illusion. Feeling free never lasts. It’s there for a moment that passes as soon as you…
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Memoir 1973: stepping into adult responsibilities and the counter-culture
In what will be one of the most formative experiences of my young life, the summer after 6th grade, our across-the-alley neighbor Debbie and her family go on vacation to Europe and take my sister Sharon with them. Unexpectedly, they have chosen me to dog sit for their dim but affectionate beagle, Tara. Yes, the…
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Memoir: 1971-72: My short-lived love affair with war narratives and killing machines
Playtime in the neighborhood is often coordinated by my sister Sharon’s friend, Debbie Smith. An only child, Debbie reaches out to the younger kids and is a positive role model for us. She organizes alley games of “Kick the Can” that are the most exciting thing in my young world–a game of intense hide-and-seek, not…
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Music: There’s a Virus Among us/Joliet Blues (2020)
Here’s a song that captures what my musical partner Andy and I used to do in my garage on a regular basis: we’d find a groove, and then extemporize upon it. And when all the conditions are right–we weren’t trying to impress anyone, we just want to explore what the simple structure of the beat…
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Music: Let’s hear it for the atom bomb (1998)
Here is a song I wrote as my marriage was dissolving, and my mind reached after metaphors that could encompass the devastation that I was feeling. I settled on the way Japan emerged more pacific from the hyper-militarism of World War II, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. It is in no way an endorsement of the use…
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Music: December Song (2007)
Fifteen years ago, I lost the commitment of a woman who loved me well. She correctly saw that we were incompatible, and I am grateful that she pulled the plug on us, but I didn’t see it coming, and so it really hurt. We had been close companions for three years. We’d travelled together, grown…
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Memoir 1965-70: a “down-sizing” with powerful repercussions; my eldest sisters; figuring out my identities and class
According to my sisters, my mother in 1965 feels exhausted keeping five children in the house at 435 N. Elmwood Ave. She is depressed and already an addict, but persuades my father to seek a simpler house in which to manage her energetic brood of five Bendelow children. They select this modest four-bedroom place at…
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Memoir: Beginnings and first recollections 1961-65
I am born at 10:10 pm on May 7th in a room at West Suburban Hospital, in Oak Park, Illinois. My parents are Ernest Bruce Bendelow, 30, and his wife, Patricia, 29. They currently reside on Second Avenue in the near-by Cook County suburb Maywood, but Bruce will soon complete purchase of a three-story, four-square…
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Memoir chapter: pre-me
My father Ernest Bruce Bendelow’s mother and father both came from Scotland to the United States. He father’s father came in 1892, his mother’s in 1903. My father’s mother, Mary (Mae) Loudon Gibson (1896-1977), and her family came from East Ayrshire, a green region of rolling hills south of Glasgow, Scotland. Their town was Dalmellington.…
The Wikiness 