For Whom I Write

Elgin, Lagrange and Oak Lawn, down in Illinois, for Memorial Day.
by Charlie Leck

I was with a couple of the grandchildren this weekend – down in Illinois. Anne was judging a horseshow on Saturday (28 May) in Elgin and it seemed a good opportunity for me to join her and take the train from Elgin to downtown Chicago and then out to Oak Lawn to visit my daughter, son-in-law and two of our grandchildren. Mind you, I’m six weeks out from my hip-replacement surgery and everyone surrounding me wondered if I should be taking trains to Chicago and walking through Union Station and climbing up into a commuter train to the suburbs. But I – I – well, I love trains and I love venturing out on my own and I’ve been feeling a strong dose of cabin-fever lately. I needed out.

Oh, my! I had a wonderful time.

Anne dropped me off at the railroad station in Elgin. She was having some trepidation about the whole thing and beseeched me several times to just let her drive me all the way into Oak Lawn.

“Nonsense!” I told her with great firmness. “You know how I love trains. I’m excited about taking the Metra Line to Union Station and then finding my way out to Oak Lawn.”

I wasn’t putting her on. I love trains. And, I love riding on them. A few weeks ago I made a list of the half-dozen things I’d like to do before I die. Two items on the list had to do with trains.

I’d like to take the Orient Express from Paris to Istanbul!

I’d like to take the Canadian VIA train from Toronto to Vancouver (Sleeper Touring Class)

This September I’m trying to work it out so that I can take a train from Paris to Prague. Another of the items on my “bucket list” is to visit the city of my maternal family’s heritage.

A young man – of twenty or so – helped me move around in Union Station and joined me in the long ticket line to purchase passage for the short run out to Oak Lawn.

“Can’t I just buy a ticket on board?” I asked.

“But you save $3 if you purchase the ticket here,” he explained to me.

The line looked to be a half-hour long and I don’t stand around to well after this hip surgery, but the boy was so genuine and helpful that I tagged along with him as we wound around and around the queue barriers. We learned a lot about each other’s lives (his certainly sounded more exciting) and I enjoyed my time talking to him. On top of that, I fell in love with the lady behind the protective glass shield at the ticket window.

“I’d like a one-way to Oak Lawn,” I politely told her.

“Are you a senior citizen?”

“Why, yes. Yes I am.”

“Sure? Sixty-five?”

“Indeed,” I laughed. “Seventy!”

“You certainly don’t look it,” she lied with a wink and a big smile. "Take the Manhattan Line on Track 14."

It’s a 35 minute ride out to the Oak Lawn station. The first 20 minutes of it are spent creeping through the rail yards that lead into and out of Union Station. The rush hour had started early on this Memorial Day weekend and extra trains had been added. It slowed the trip down as the trains traversed the crowded tracks near the depot. Once away from the yard, the train made up the time it had lost and flew through the Southside of Chicago with stops only in Wrightwood and Ashburn before pulling into Oak Lawn. They were waiting there and they were a beautiful sight for my tired eyes and I loved the hugs and kisses they shared with me.

Well, seeing two of my grandchildren – for whom I write this blog (so that there will be something of a memoir left behind me) – was just wonderful. Oh, my! How they grow. The oldest grandchild, now seven, was reading to me like an adult – swift and smooth and with meaning!

They made sure I had a good time – and Grandma, too, when she joined us on Saturday night. A family barbeque with lots of my son-in-law’s uncles, aunts, nephews and nieces, plenty of time playing children’s games, an attractive tattoo for my arm and a really lovely visit to Lagrange – a really handsome and colorful town that I will always remember as a special and good place. Breakfast at Mulberry Hill was terrific!

I’m home now and I’m ready to tackle some of life’s complex problems. Here I go again! I’ll be offering solutions for world peace, ending homelessness and hunger, growing jobs for America and the industrialized world and improving agricultural out-put. Tune in again when I’m not so melancholy about grandchildren and trains.

_________________________

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Because it is there!

Making it to the top!
by Charlie Leck

George Mallory and Andrew Irvine were preparing to climb Mount Everest in August of 1924. Mallory was asked why he wanted to make the climb.

“Because it’s there!” Mallory bluntly answered.

The two climbers disappeared on their way to the mountain top. The expression of grief around the world was intense and enormous and “marked the beginning of Everest’s allure and attraction.” [Larry Gormley]

The challenge to make it to the top never seems to recede in the souls of men, women and children. They continue to climb mountains around the world, simply because they are there.

Ann Rose Deiters and Caroline Jean Deiters,
grandchildren of the author,
are the climbers used to illustrate this blog.

Why blog on and on and on?

I'm back!
by Charlie Leck

My wife was out and about today, doing a bunch of errands. Here in the quiet house, I was struggling with a title and a theme for this particular post on my blog, when she slid through the door to our house that leads in from the garage. "I'm back," she called out!

Voila! There you have it! "I'm back!" And, with my return, you get a bucket-load of exclamation marks!

I've been away and busy fulfilling a Christmas promise made to our little girl. If you've been stopping in, you've seen that the last six postings were a series of memoirs from my experience in Mississippi in 1964. If you read them, thank you! If you are one of the dozen or so people who sent such nice reactions to them, thank you also.

Now, however, it's time to return to blogging about current events and activities. It was quite a tiring and emotional trip returning to the sixties and I'm happy that I've come back to the current moment.

One good, old friend from New Jersey posed an interesting question last week in response to my series of memories. "Why do you write?" He asked it sincerely. He wondered about the huge effort it must require to post a few essays each week. "Certainly you are not driven by readership," he stated bluntly.

I guess that comment brought me back to reality. I'm read regularly by somewhere between a few dozen and a few hundred people. I've been impressed by those numbers, though I clearly shouldn't be.

Why then do I do it? Why do I write?

I'm not sure how many people will understand this; however, I'll try to explain it. Or, as Lucy's husband used to say on that TV show we all liked so much: "Let me splain myself."

I write for those little ones up there – the ones in that photo. They are my grandchildren. I hope, someday, long after I am gone, they may have some urge to figure out just who their old grandfather really was.

I've often wondered that about my grandparents. I barely knew them. Oh, I can remember times in their homes and sitting around the great, long Thanksgiving Day table with them, listening to them chatter away; yet, I really didn't get to know them. For that matter, I didn't even get to know my parents very well. What was inside them? What made them tick? What did they like about life? What enraged them? What drove them? What were their hopes? Their fears? Their weaknesses? How deeply did they love? Were they people of real faith?

My grandchildren don't live nearby. I don't get to see them all that often. We don't have much opportunity to get to know each other.

One day, if they wonder about me, as I wonder so constantly about my grandparents, they will be able to pull this massive pile of papers from the boxes on a shelf, and read to their hearts content about dear, old Grandpa Charlie. Or, they'll shove a disk or chip or some other wondrous device of the future into a computer and up will pop the strange writings of their odd, old grandfather.

Am I being vain to think they will even care? Perhaps! I don't know. I can only tell you how I've yearned to know more about my grandparents, and their grandparents, and I always feel sad that I can't learn anything about them.

I am so envious of my dear wife and the fact that she had a great grandfather who was a writer. There are hundreds of pages of his thoughts that I have read through. He wrote about everything, including his parents and their parents and his children and their children. Through him we've been able to learn so much about her family, about their pioneer adventures and their arrival in Minnesota. Because of his essays and commentaries, I know this fellow nearly intimately. He died nearly a hundred years ago; yet over here, in this stack of boxes in the corner, he's as alive as if he were sitting here chatting with me. Good, old great grandpa Wakefield, I'm so happy I got to know you.

And, if some day my grandchildren's grandchildren happen upon these papers, I'd like to say hello and let you know that I hope you are well and happy. I hope, too, that you are kind and caring people; for there is nothing in all of life more important than that. My daughter, Jennifer, has a computerized signature on all her email messages that quotes Kurt Vonnegut, one of the great authors of my time, saying this same thing: "Damn it, children, you've got to be kind!"

So that's why I write. It is because I don't want to leave this world all together and completely. I want some little part of me to hang around and hang on just as long as possible. Is that ego driven? Does it reveal some base insecurity of mind? Have I an inflated sense of my own importance? Duh-know!

I just want to write it for them. The blog is a perfect discipline for me. It's hanging out there in the wonderful, spectacular Internet, and three times each week I post something on it and the stack of papers and materials left behind for my grandchildren keeps growing. Go figure!

NEXT: The Enigma that is Barack Obama