Author: abendelow
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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 do in my garage on a regular basis: we find a groove, and then extemporize upon it. And when all the conditions are right–we’re not trying to impress anyone, we just want to explore what the simple structure of the beat and harmony…
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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.…
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Book review: Amor Towles’ Rules of Civility
Amor Towles’ Rules of Civility (2011) As an enthusiast of his A Gentleman in Moscow (2016), I wanted to totally enjoy this earlier effort of the author’s, but its sketchy conclusion left me wanting. Until the ending (and after the first two chapters), I was entirely enthralled by this time-travel to New Year’s Eve, 1938…
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Memoir introduction: Losing my religion–from dispensationalism to pantheism
Over MLK Weekend 2022, my wife and I enjoyed a winter “staycation” in the Loop, where we stayed in a wonderful room on the 12th floor of the historic Reliance Building, arguably the finest remaining skyscraper of the First Chicago School of architecture. The accommodations in the room were clean and very comfortable: not…
The Wikiness 