Opinions

Even though I’ve celebrated my 83rd birthday and am in no danger of having my mother discover I’ve broken one or more of her rules, I find I still feel pangs of guilt when I do. When we were kids, my big sister could blackmail me into almost anything by threatening to tell Mother I may have committed one or more misdemeanors. Whether I had or not, just the threat that Mother might be inclined to suspect or to investigate any such accusations was enough to make me knuckle under to my sister’s pressure.

Attentive readers will note last week it was my byline on the photos taken at the Iowa/Ohio State football game. Don Lund normally takes them, but he’s sidelined after a hip replacement operation.
So they got me out of retirement, and you may have noticed the orange hat on the sidelines during the game. It was the first sporting event I’ve photographed since selling the newspapers in 2000.

Over the years, I’ve documented several times that my father in his prime kept in near perpetual motion doing part-time jobs to go along with his full-time job of deliveryman for Marshall Fields.
He distributed newspapers in the early morning, pumped gas on his lunch hour, drove taxi in the evening, painted houses, fixed cars on weekends and delivered Easter lilies while taking a week’s vacation from the iconic Chicago department store.
On a recent trip home, I learned of a couple more.

“What’s the name of the place again?” Sabra requested as she looked up from her plate of ratatouille. I pronounced her dish as “ratatatatouille,” something I tend to do when I find the original word funny.
Other words I like to butcher include quesadilla (quasidillios), hors d’oeuvre (horse dervies) and the Nebraskan town of Ogallala (ooogalalala).
We were at the Blue Bird Diner in downtown Iowa City; eating and talking about the play we were about to see at the Riverside Theatre.

Agatha Christie wrote a murder mystery titled “Halloween Party” in which a young girl is drowned in a tub of water used for the game of bobbing for apples. The challenge is to catch an apple floating in water without using your hands. I found it nearly impossible to sink my teeth into a floating apple, as it requires a bit of pressure to bite into the apple’s skin, and the apple tends to skitter away unless you can manage to corral it against the side of the tub. The game tends to be a rather soggy affair for all participants and is death on crepe paper costumes and face-painting.