Author: abendelow
-
Fantasy dinner: Hello, grandsires (2024)
Dear Great Grandfathers, It’s been 120 years since you were in the full force of your manhood, yet all I have of you are a few stories and characterizations left to me from your grandkids, who were my parents. Please dine with me (presuming your magical embodiment nourishes itself at my favorite French restaurant on…
-
Memoir: Musical Madeleines (1970-73) (1983-85)
“… in that time Taupin’s protagonists grew dark with a growing awareness of corruption and human depravity–strong stuff for 12-year-old me.”
-
Memoir: a path not taken (1979)
There are moments in which we decide with huge consequence. One such decision was when I declared that I would no longer be a “Pre-Law” major in my freshman year at college. Why had I thought “Pre-Law” a good choice? In my Junior year of high school, my mother and I decided that a legal…
-
Memoir: back to school again, but different (2024)
It’s “back to school time,” late September, and I feel nostalgia for all those autumns I bravely buckled up, put on the uniform, bid farewell to summer leisure reading and reconciled myself to another year of Education-ese. All teachers understood the calendar: in August or September, get your s-word together. You’re working for the school…
-
Memoir: Big surprise (2022-23)
In the fall of 2022, about a year after I retired, I decided to disrupt my relationship with alcohol. Drinking had become automatic and was no longer working for me. My doctor threatened blood pressure meds if I couldn’t lower my hypertension, and cholesterol pills if I couldn’t improve my blood quality. So I decided…
-
Music: “Grown Old,” my 1986 reflection on the 1968 Chicago riots
As the Chicago DNC wound down last week, I recorded this song, which I wrote when a callow 24 year old. It was my take on how the 1968 yippie riot generation had aged, fifteen years on. At that time in my life I was starting to work closely with wealthy liberals and so got…
-
Memoir: unsung hero Sharon (1971-72)
In 1971 and 72, when mom is bodily present between stints in psych wards, she disappears for days in deep chemical fogs inside her bedroom, inaccessible to us kids. Into the motherless void steps fifteen-year-old Sharon, who becomes a loving presence for her younger siblings, Sheila, Sarah, and me. It is Sharon who in mom’s…
-
Memoir: something that went bump in my night, or my first time with the Violent Femmes (1983)
Finks is a second-floor music club on Normal’s Front Street, where they have Augsberger (Light and Dark) on tap. I am 22, a grad student at ISU, and the unappointed taste maker and music critic of my Central Illinois metropolis. I am qualified, having read books by Griel Marcus, listened to old blues recordings, subscribed…
-
Book review: Just Breathe, by Dan Brulé
Do you need a lesson to perform what happens naturally? I’ve read two books that got me to see my basic functions differently, and as a consequence, behave differently. The first was Zen Macrobiotics by George Ohsawa. I read it as a 24-year-old and it forever disenthralled me from the standard American diet. I read…
The Wikiness 