Category: Uncategorized
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Memoir: the education of a toxic male, 1966-72
I met Kevin when my family moved into the south Oak Park home across the alley from his family, I was five, and he a year younger, and over the next six years or so we were constant playmates outside of school. A clever kid, Kevin was a natural athlete, who spurred my growth as…
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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 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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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 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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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…
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Memoir Self-reflection: Black and White thinking
As suggested elsewhere, a big part of my family’s culture was centered around the Bible-believing Plymouth Brethren. In the Austin neighborhood, on Leamington Avenue, this group of fundamentalist Christians that included my father’s grandparents established this “Gospel Hall” (photo from 2018) in the 1910s. The congregants of this fellowship ordered their lives by its weekly…
The Wikiness 