Deco report

I do a lot of walking around Galesburg, about two or three miles a night, but it's all pretty much on the same route so most of the deco I see is actually during the day, driving around. Still, I'm curious about it. Most of my observations below are actually hypotheses - I believe them but can't necessarily prove them; they're open for argument. Feel free to chime in if the blog lets you comment.

First, deco is a medium-size town thing - towns like Galesburg tend to go overboard, like Parsons, Kansas, but smaller towns have less of an audience, and larger towns have more to do, so their residents don't feel like taking the chance of putting something out there that could be stolen or used against them. Therefore Galesburg and towns its size tend to have more deco per capita.

Second, fall is overtaking Christmas in both length and amount. I saw the first fall deco in mid-August - that's two and a half months before Halloween and it's not even over at Halloween. There are more skeletons than Santas. There are two kinds of fall deco - the haybale/strawman/pumpkin healthy kind, then the death/black/vampire/blood/skeleton kind which is way more popular. In this secular age nobody seems to be into Jesus and the creche altough you do see some, but whoa there are plenty of skeletons and vampires out there. And there are a few that mix healthy fall haybales with ghosts and vampires, all in fun I'm sure.

Third, this year may be a bit milder than last year, so I'm not really sure if fall/death deco is still increasing exponentially. In these over-deco towns I'm already chagrined that the first pumpkins went on sale Sept. 1 - how can a live pumpkin keep from rotting for two months if someone has already carved it? But it's like Christmas trees - you have to buy in early just so you can celebrate all season and waiting until the last week, or maybe last two weeks, is stupid anyway so why should it even be possible? Those Sept. 1 pumpkins will be long gone by mid-October and anyone who wanted to carve just one for Halloween will be SOL as they say.

We live near Broad and Mary, Halloween capitol of Galesburg, where cars come from all around on the big night, park near that corner, and watch their kids walk up and down the street hitting up the castles. One put on a show for them. We buy four or five bags of candy and it's not nearly enough, and we no longer send teens out to greedily get some of it back and even up the score. My wife is about done with it - ready to turn off the lights and hide in the back - but she wants a fake tree too just to cut back on the fuss and maybe the work. In other words we've reached the age where we don't even look forward to the holidays, or at least she doesn't, and I do but readily admit I can't do the work I used to, the deco, the cards, the wrapping, the hauling of the tree, etc. Keeping up with the culture is a lot of work.

So, mid-September and my question is: is it going over the top again, as an annual tradition? Are the lights just now coming out, purple and orange - are they the new light colors for fall deco? Think we'll see any real bats? Out here, in the historic district, we might. They don't mind it the way it is, and they fly around a lot now, because it could be a long winter.

burg pop

from my walk

I live on the same block as Judy's; it's my claim to fame. When people far and wide want to know about Galesburg I mention Judy's and half the time they know what I'm talking about. But my family doesn't go out often, so that occasion was a time make some pics and provide a pop exhibit.

My foster daughters are moving back across town, so we told them we'd walk up to Judy's before they left. We walked up there today; it was a beautiful day. There were plenty of places to sit. Judy was there but was not working.

Some tourists came in while we were there. I swear at least half the families were from out of town, but these people were clearly from out of town. That's the first thing I have to say about Judy's: she brings them in. Do you see tourists anywhere else? Not really. But at Judy's on a Thursday morning, there were several. She took pictures with them. The waitresses tried to sell them a shirt.

Second, the place is strongly remodeled and there's lots of room in it. I faced directly across the street and it was a nice view, not crowded. The place was filling up and still wasn't crowded. The decor was sharp like Steak & Shake, a classic diner kind of feel. It looked good. The fact that it filled up was good too. She was making money.

There's nothing special about pancakes but one kind had this kind of lemon sauce on them and my wife wanted to try it so I ordered those. They were good. It's pancakes as pancakes are supposed to be.

My wife is mad at her for embracing the national guard and the people who occupied Washington. I say Judy was noot trying to be political and therefore should be forgiven for putting such people in her movies. Give her a break.

I'm glad to report she knew who I was, remembered my offer to make a book, and even remembered that I live on the same block. Another thing I like aboot her is that she's a pop artist like me. The logo, visible in one the pictures below, is a kind of pop image. I approve. So I will make pop too and will even keep making it. I'll put it on my pop pages.

Here's to you, Judy. Galesburg and I thank you.

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Pretty wild Fourth

Here are a couple of research questions:

Do you feel that private fireworks buyers are generally Trump-oriented? Are people who display a flag on their truck generally Trump-oriented? Were there more private fireworks this year than ever before?

I felt, yes, yes, yes. It was very loud after the city's show, all over town, especially in our neighborhood. My guess is that that fireworks tent did better than ever before. Furthermore, it spread, over the entire weekend, and the weekend before, and pretty much all month.

Why do I bring Trump into it? Just curious. If you love the country, are patriotic, notice that it's not going so well, know that it's a 250 year, etc. etc., this could all spur you into buying an extra handful, no? I know that there are some of us on the other side (in favor of free elections, freedom of the press, separation of powers, the constitution) who are also into fireworks, and into guns too. I know it's not a 100/0 situation. It's just a feeling I've got that these are Trumpers out making a lot of noise.

We set up in the old Mall parking lot. There were about ten other cars/families who had the same idea. Kids ran around freely with the air fresher and less interaction due to less accidental stepping on blankets. Less bad air from everyone else's sparklers. Less time on the road waiting behind someone, while very slow traffic lets out.

But there were fireworks in all directions, all during the city's show, and all afterward. Many of them were as big as, and competed with, those of the city. Many were very loud.

Here are some more research questions: Was this true all over the country? Did anyone get hurt? Is it memorable distinctly or will it go down as just one more night of firecrackers?

Another Railroad Days bites the dust

It would be irresponsible to have a Galesburg-oriented blog and not at least mention Railroad Days, which once again just came and went. I love Railroad Days; I love Galesburg. But I know very little about either one, actually. Enough about Galesburg to do this blog. Enough about Railroad Days to be glad to see them again.

This year it rained and all I could think of was, it's raining on our parade. Kind of dampened everyone's spirits and at the same time kept a lot of kids home who could have been at the top of the ferris wheel. I have had a lot of personal issues lately and for that reason found myself on Mulberry Street a lot and I could therefore drive right past the Railroad Museum and the train station. And I was glad that there were people at the heart of it all, checking out railroad history and walking around the old railroad cars parked there.

I drive by Judy's a lot because I live in her neighborhood, on her block actually, and I always honk and wave when I see her. This weekend I saw her, honked and waved, and she never even looked up. She was too busy. Some other diners caught me and smiled but the light turned green and I had to keep going down Fremont Street. I consider Judy to be the person who brings the most tourists to Galesburg: fresh people, from far away, come to see Galesburg and especially Judy's. She's a tourist attraction. The place was packed.

I have a couple of daughters who wanted to do the fair so I took them down to the bank where one cashed in some money so they could go. Picked them up an hour or two later and they got into the car screaming at each other. They had had some kind of fight and it didn't get better; it got worse. All past the Innkeeper's, through downtown, and back across by the Railroad Museum they were screaming so loud I couldn't hear myself think. This was my Railroad Days. There will never be another one like it.

Let me record that it happened. It looked like the model train setup out on Fremont had a nice full parking lot. People got out there. People came to Galesburg. Biggest drinking weekend in western Illinois, I told my daughter's boyfriend. I don't know if he liked that or not. It was somewhat of a novelty to him to get out of Peoria, have a living room, and stay out of the crowds. In some ways we live our separate lives, taking care of many children, some of whom have special needs. The world goes on. People come to town, then they go back. Now comes the Fourth.

No Kings 3-28

Quakers in.Galesburg

Quakers, or the Society of Friends, do not number more than a few thousand nationwide. So it's not surprising that Galesburg's Friends' Meeting, Spoon River, has apparently gone dormant. Quakers are spread far and wide even in the Midwest.

Quakers believe that each person can access God directly, and does not need a church hierarchy to get in the way. We can by ourselves discern what is right and good and necessary, and what should be our path. Small rural meetings used to have farm families that helped each other in a pinch, and worked as communities, but thoough rural people could be as nosy and judgmental as anyone, it wasn't built into the religion that one had to behave a certain way. There was general agreements about many things - violence for example - but there was rarely unanimity about things like fighting in WWII, or whether one could carry a gun if one's job required it. People are left to their own consciences in such matters.

As the rural communities aged out of existence, Quakers have had to adjust. College towns still have functioning meetings and big cities often do too. But places like Galesburg - maybe not.

I moved here in 2022, and brought Cloud Quakers with me. It had been started before the pandemic because at the time I had to drive across two mountain ranges and the Tularosa Basin (inluding the White Sands) just to get to my meeting. Here, I would only have to go to Burlington. But I already have a meeting, so I don't. I drive enough in my life anyway.

Our meeting gets. on zoom Sunday evenings at 7 pm local time. To try it, follow directions at the page linked above, or find us on Facebook. We'll be shocked to find someone from Galesburg, but on the other hand, it shouldn't be that much of a surprise. There are. isolated people eager to practice the religion and have a community all over the place. We have a healthy meeting, but I'm surprised we don't have more since there are basically Quakers all. over the place, in places like Galesburg, with no place to go. Community is important to religion. You can. say you practice non-violence, and practice doing good in this world, and work for social justice and peace among people, but it's really important for us to check in once in a while, get advice on what's right or wrong, or talk about our spiritual journeys. Having real people share our struggles not only helps us get them on the table, but also gets input from like-minded people about how to approach the. problems.

We often don't have much in coommon about. religious dogma in our meetings; we are more likely to agree on politics than on the nature of the Holy Trinity or Heaven and Hell. Though we avoid argument about these things (often), most of us are seekers of some kind and have active spiritual/religious lives. Galesburg now is the home of this meeting. It is international; it is regular; it has been going oon for about six years; and it will survive and carry on.

The world needs more Quakers, and needs those of us who are out here in the world, to carry our flag and show how it can be done.

Interview

Galesburg Public Library Blog interview
https://galesburglibrary.org/local-author-highlight-thomas-leverett/

I'll say more about this later; it will be coming around Facebook soon enough, too.

A Train Story

I arrived at the train station at 10:40 at night as that was the expected arrival time for a train, an Amtrak, that was very late. It had been a very long day. The station was locked and deserted. There wasn't a soul in sight though there were cars in the parking lot. I walked around to the front of the building: still no one. Emptiness. Silence.

I figured, the train is probabiy just a little more late, and I settled into my car to read for a few minutes. I was there to pick up an 18-year-old who has an incredible story. Basically someone put the wrong date on his birth certificate, December 8, when his birthday was yesterday, December 9. So he was going to Chicago to have it fixed and get a new birth certificate. And he needed this because of the whole car/license rite of passage that all 16-20-year-olds go through. He's >dying to get a car. So at 7 this morning I had brought him to the train and now, at 10:40 supposedly, he was. coming back.

At about eleven the station showed signs of life. It's as if some guy was taking a nap deep within it and just came out, turned lights on, and unlocked doors. Similarly some people showed up in the parking lot around me. It's as if they came out of nowhere. These people had a more updated Time of Arrival than 10:40; they knew something I didn't. Because they were all there at once.

I walked with the station manager out to the tracks. It was cold and windy, a very bleak winter night; what a time to have a birthday. I asked the guy if hard ice could derail a train. I know that they can plow their own snow, drifts of six feet or more, but the question is whether hard ice itself could run them off the track. He didn't know. We saw the light in the distance - train coming. It was coming through Galesburg, and toward us, and its light was steadily getting bigger.

Out there on the tracks there was an interesting view back at the station, and of the train museum, and of the town itself. There was some construction out there, and there was some decoration, altogether a bizarre combination of lights, with of course the one train light being the most important.

The train, it turns out, had hit a car in the suburbs of Chicago somewhere, and scraped it along the tracks; an ambulance had taken its passenger off, and the whole thing had caused the huge delay. Some car, he said, had tried to beat the crossing guards. Later I looked it up and it seemed as if it wasn't even news. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong place.

When the train finally arrived it had dozens of people. I was surprised. That's why there were cars in the lot, I guess. Everyone was grateful to finally be back in Galesburg again. The kid had had quite a birthday, but had the birth certificate in his pack. He had succeeded....and had had a memorable birthday.

Prairie St. II

Prairie Street

deco

Local Author Fair

open letter to the guy who gave me the hard finger at the no kings rally:

what has our country come to that you feel such hatred for someone or some people who are protesting what is happening? why are we so divided? it now seems almost inevitable that we are headed for civil war.

we obviously live in two different worlds. we watch or read entirely different news. yours seems to believe that portland is a war zone, chicago is a war zone, los angeles is a war zone, and yes a lot of these cities have a huge number of people who are not white. is that what it really comes down to, that you'd be much more comfortable if it was all white?

i'm out there because he's corrupt, because he's been cheating all his life and he's going to take our government machinery and start cheating with it. are you in favor of that? or is it just that the news you watch is in favor of it, because somehow they benefit, and you just get riled up in the process? it seems to me, as one of my friends pointed out, that you are prepared to give up your health insurance in order to be sure that no immigrant gets health. insurance either. if that's true, it'll be an unhealthy world.

but that was already painfully obvious.

Art Deco

The decorating season is long and seems to be composed of two different segments, each two months. The first, Halloween (Sept. 1-Oct. 30) has been growing considerably, to the point that a visitor from out of town might believe Galesburg is totally overtaken by fall deco. In fact though I think it's me; all small towns of about this size are into deco. What else is there to do? You have two full months to show the best you can do before you switch over into the Christmas stuff.

At first I thought the fall had overtaken Christmas, but the Christmas deco is still going strong and it will start on Nov. 1, as the fall deco people have long got tired of their pumpkins and skeletons and are ready for some different themes. In a way you can say that Christmas is a little more limited, having only red and green as true colors, and snow, sleds, Santa, and reindeer can hardly compete with the fabulous variety you have in fall. Fall these days has moved beyond skeletons and bats, pumpkins, hay bales, and witches. I sometimes think it's glorifying axe-murderers, and maybe it is, or maybe that's just a reaction to Santa. Do you really want an axe-murderer on your front yard, with all that bloood, for two months? I suppose so, especially if it took you four or five months to make it.

My goal by the way is to start documenting this stuff a little better. If a town goes to all this work to decorate, the least the rest of us can do is pay tribute to it by documenting. I don't think Galesburg is that different from, or better or worse than, towns of similar size; my guess is that this is happening all over. September 1, people are dying to get out there, and they do; it's all they can do not to decorate the other months of the season. But I have noticed, by the way, that flag season now starts at the beginning of May and stretches on well into August.

So what happens in January through April? Mostly people just keep their Christmas decorations up. They went such trouble, especially with the lights, that it's a shame to take them down anyway. You have to have something out there. We have this kind of hanging Santa, I kind of forgot to take him down, and he's there to show our nominal agreement with the idea decorating. Maybe I can't keep up with the Joneses, but at least I can make an effort.

The Mall

I was coming down out of Target today, and looked across the U-Haul, and saw the entrance of the old Mall, Carl Sandburg Mall. It was quite impressive, actually, though the mall has been closed for many years. I don't even know who owns it, so I'll just say, you can take my ideas or leave them, I'm just an average Galesburg resident. I did not shop much at malls even when they were in their heyday, so my advice may not be valuable.
But Galesburg is in the position of many towns of 30,000 or so (23.000?) - it just can't support a mall very well these days. It's partly because the wealthy are doing all their shopping online, and many of the big stores are in trouble no matter where they are. But since the pandemic the whole concept of going to a single place for all kinds of high-end shopping has just kind of gone out of style. People don't necessarily want to be seen in such places, because they just don't want to go out in general.

So what should this person/these people, owners of our mall as we know it, do? I notice that it has a few new tenants. It has not done anything to pave or improve the parking lot or the road around it; Mall Drive is the pothole capital of Galesburg.

In some places, malls as we know them have been repurposed in very interesting ways. Community center? College? Factory or set of factories? These are all interesting possibilities. Maybe what we/they should do is investigate. Maybe the community should get involved.

We could buy it cheap, probably, if we had a good idea.

Railroad Days

I'm not in the position to mention much about Railroad Days, which came and went last week, because 1) I'm very busy with family these days, and they were booked so solid over the weekend that we never even went; and 2) I was actually grateful, since I'm not one for cotton candy or carney games which is where such things utlimately lead. I've had twelve kids and almost all of them got sucked into carnivals at one time or another and I'm beginning to have a bad attitude.

There are other things besides carney things, though, and unfortunately I missed those too. Train shows is to me the best example. I like those, just didn't have time.

One thing I noticed was that it didn't have much social media or online presence. As late as the day before it started, I couldn't find a schedule online and when I finally did, I couldn't read it well. Somebody had dropped the social media ball. But I took that as a challenge. Obviously they need volunteers, and this is something I could do.

Hopefully next year! See you then!