Tag: oak park
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Memoir: Clean-up man
My father was raised by a Scottish task-mistress who made him clean the house before he could have fun, and he passed along this mandate to me and my sisters: first you clean, then play. As a boy, I learned to sanitize toilets, scrub tubs, mop floors, wash dishes, and unlike most people, I loved […]
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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 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 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 