Author: abendelow
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Memoir: a lunchtime intervention (1972-73)
By year two of our lunches, I’d become conversant with the riches of the district’s media collection accessed through her authority: endless filmstrips and 16mm history and science films.
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Review: Kimberly Akimbo (June 2025 at CIBC Theater, Chicago)
There is plenty of darkness in Kimberly’s world. Her very birth was traumatic for her parents, neither of whom has coped well with having produced “faulty” offspring.
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Music: Back from Alaska
Upon returning from the land of the midnight sun, I stewarded this out of the Beach Avenue Garage.
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Notes from an Alaska trip (2025)
“I enlisted in the Marines when I was 17, and when I got back from Vietnam two years later, I was an E5 Sergeant, 19 years old. It was 1970. And I couldn’t buy a beer.” Our white-bearded, energetic driver smiled at his reminiscence. “The age was 21. Well, here in the state of Alaska,…
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Music: Summer Drive-in
Here’s a rough collaboration that evokes horror movie viewing in one’s car with the windows down.
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Music: Look at all the dandelions #NomowMay2025
Here’s a song that our overgrown lawn inspired. The lyrics speak of seeing beyond the surface of things and being ready for what arises.
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Memoir: a road not taken (1968-72)
My first physical fight with another male occurs shortly after we move to 1022 S. Scoville. I was five years old. In the backyard, under the cherry tree, one of my soon-to-be playmates, a couple of years older than I, had somehow provoked me. We fell to pushing and grappling, and pretty soon he got…
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Memoir: My father’s gift and my son’s (1971/2025)
My son and his wife don’t exchange gifts. They think that love expressed in material forms merely creates more clutter in a surfeited world. They might also tell you that the day-to-day “gifts” of mutual respect, service, and sacrifice are the only true tokens of a loving partnership. Not I. I was programmed by post-war…
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Memoir: Some education things I left behind (1994-2021)
My friend Laura, who still teaches at the school where I served the last 27 years of my career, texted. She wanted to know if I’d be interested in the $30/hour job of supervising exams. Test administration was the worst part of my job, the part called “summative assessment” that really meant “Son we’re gonna…
The Wikiness 