Left to my own devices

Not long ago, I watched the 1993 film, The Remains of the Day . Based on a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, it's a Merchant Ivory Production about life at a British estate, pre-WWII. It stars Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, as the butler and housekeeper, respectively. There is the most subtle element of potentially romantic feelings between the two, but Hopkins's character is far too repressed to ever be able to acknowledge them. Today is the 25th anniversary of my father's passing. There's rarely a week that goes by where I don't think of him -- what his life would have been like had it not been cut short by cancer, how our father-son relationship would have evolved as I'd grown more into adulthood, what he would've thought of everything that's happened since August of 1997, etc. I've also come to realize that he's one of the reasons I tend to be drawn to emotionally unavailable men in fiction and, sometimes, in real life.

"I'm of a mind to make some mooky. Phonebook."                                                          -- The Joker Tim Burton's Batman opened at the North American box office 32 years ago today. It remains one of the most viviv movie-going experiences I've ever had, or will have. Paradoxically, that day, now over three decades ago, seems like ancient history and also as if it had happened. yesterday. In those seemingly halcyon days of the late nineteen-eighties, superhero movies were not as commonplace as they are today. Getting something like the 1989 Batman movie was a real treat. It arrived at a time when I was an avid comic book reader. Marvel was my brand of choice, with Thor, Captain America, Spider-Man, and The Avengers as my monthly stalwarts. Batman is a DC comic, yet I was still very much stoked for this modernized version of h...

I happened across the listing by chance, as one so often does when perusing the internet. Curiously enough, I am familiar with both the house and the listing agent, the house having once belonged to a friend's family, and the listing agent being an old school chum. But it's the house that grabbed me. It's the house that, frankly, tugs at my heart strings. 315 S. Garfield Ave. in Champaign, Illinois is, in many respects, a house like any other. Cape code-style, 3 bedrooms, 2.5 baths, located on a nice, quiet street (I promise I'm not attempting to do an ad for it). So, yes, a fairly typical middle-class home in the midwest. What makes this abode special (to me) is its history. Here resided my good friend Derrick and his parents Ike and Linda. Here, dear reader, I spent many happy moments of my youth.