Author: Peter Freilinger

Bald Men Beware – Horseflies Drawn To Your Skull!

I was walking down Michigan Avenue this morning and fell in step behind a man roughly my age with a shaved head, a somewhat too-large suit (looks like he’s lost some weight, I thought), and a briefcase.  Apparently there’s a machine tools convention in town, the barman last night told me it was a big one, about 100,000 people, and this guy had the look of someone in the machine tool sales way.  There was a pretty substantial fly sitting at the very top of his head, enjoying the sun beaming down and since we were walking with the wind, probably appreciating the relative stillness on top of his host as well.  I’ve been that guy before and I was wondering whether I should warn him; by the time one becomes aware of a horsefly on one’s pate, it’s far too late, and the bite will be great.  I just chuckled as I came up with the rhyme and let the bug be.  On the next corner, we stopped for the crossing light, and the bug stayed, calm, satisfied I expect.  I zipped by him when the light turned. Continue reading “Headlines from a lost newspaper”

The Lake Shore Limited finally rolled into Chicago, three and half hours late.  My son and his new friend, a ten year old we had met the night before while he and his mom were playing cards and my son and I were playing board games, took one another’s hands and walked along the platform towards the station hall.  We parents snapped pictures from behind.  Both boys seem a bit obsessive; my son with his trains, the other, older boy with numbers and math and patterns, and in one another they seem to have found someone who was both understandable and willing to understand.

Continue reading “Le Bâtisseur d’Empire”

I don’t normally like to take topics “ripped from the headlines,” but I have to admit a certain amount of sympathy earlier this week for Rudy Giuliani, one of Trump’s many lawyers, who was caught out last week declaring that “truth isn’t truth” on one of the many endless news talking head shows.  The soundbite was, without question, bad for the President; but it also wasn’t wrong.  Don’t get me wrong: Giuliani is defending a fascist, and his cause is abominable.  But we can find value in the statements of those who are fighting a lost or even ignoble cause; and I think that we should open ourselves to statements which are worth considering even when they come from people who are on the side of evil.  It gets back to the notion in recent posts that artists without the concept of goodness, who exhibit only immoral actions, can still create works which we have to consider as containing beauty.  I don’t like the fact that they can create beauty but I have to acknowledge that they still do so.

Continue reading “Truth isn’t truth”

We took my son to Mass the weekend before last, to the church I used to go to as a child.  The Church of the Bug-Eyed Jesus, as my sacrilegious friend used to call it, was built sometime in the late fifties or early sixties on the site of probably an only slightly older church of the same name (not the Church of the Bug-Eyed Jesus, of course).  The way you knew it was a new church was because the parish school and the sacristy were of the standard turn of the century Maine brick style – both constructed clearly to avoid being burned down the way Portland had been in the great fire of 1866, the way all buildings of the late nineteenth century around here were built, with granite windowsills and external stairways and a solid design that said this building will not come down except with high explosives.  The new church, on the other hand, is midcentury modern, light and airy with thin curving walls, geometric without being boxy, with material chosen not so much for local access and heaviness as for color and harmony of form.  As a church, it felt (and feels) universal in appearance – fitting for a Catholicism which claims divine universality – even as it sits comfortably across the street from an old gas station, the local walk-up ice cream stand, and a dry cleaner.

Continue reading “Midcentury medieval”

There are good summers – the ones that linger in your memory for the rest of your life, the ones that even while you’re living them, make you marvel at how they could ever even happen.  I had one of those three years ago.

Continue reading “Board games”