great expectations

Driving overland tomorrow, back to Chicago, at the tail end of a year long something or other that I'm still trying to sort out.

I plan to drive by Hoisington, Kansas, where my Nini was born, and which her family left Grapes of Wrath style when the earth kicked up dust as fine as face powder in 1935.

I'm not expecting much from a little town where the only Yelp review is for the Dollar General store (4 stars, one review, "good place to grab a few cheap things"). I'm just going to see what I can see.

hull house

On the road to Kenosha.

high as an elephant's eye

Corn.
Utica, IL

mornin'

Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

Breakfast at Joy & Ed's. The back room's a bar.
The dining room's rimmed with a Thomas Kincade wallpaper border.

One long wall is hung with photographs of our waitress from grade school through graduation. Four old guys are hanging out in the far back corner, where I suspect they meet most mornings, commiserating over coffee.

And it's my birthday.

Posting by cameraphone from Utica, IL

bodies at rest and in motion

holga.

the necessity of ruins

As promised from the road, a full-blown photo series on the Frontier Drive-in, RV Park and Diner in Center, CO »

If you don't want to hassle with the slideshow you can clickthrough to the thumbnails here »

p.s. I swiped the title of this post from a really lovely work that I spotted at the Denver Art Museum just before hitting the road -- I'll be back with proper artist attribution.

game on

I'm not a big sports fan, but I am a big sister, and I'm a huge fan of my little brother who gigs for the Broncos now that he's all grown up (the man has three almost four kids already -- guess that counts as all grown up).

Flew into Denver yesterday AM, hung out with the family, and then headed over to the stadium to see Game 1 of the Bronco pre-season -- ostensibly. But mostly really to see my brother do his thing as the producer of the video content that runs on the ThunderVision board for the duration of the game.



And then tour the control room and the press box and his offices afterwards, and hear silly stadium trivia like: they used to have to climb right up to the giant monitor to flip the switch that lowered the protective metal guard, but then they had stadium engineering rig a run-of-the-mill garage door opener to handle the task -- so now after the game they just pull out the garage door remote and lower the guard on the multi-million dollar video panel from inside the control room.

And there's also the mouth guard -- if you've been to the new Invesco Field in Denver you know that sculptures of football gear writ large litter the promenade up to the main entrance -- but maybe you didn't know that the gigantic mouth guard is the actual impression of Terrell Davis's teeth.



All fun. But the best part was heading back to the homestead, sleeping late this morning and waking up to a pancake breakfast prepared with careful attention by my young nieces, swapping stories and laughing with my family.

Home again.

Posting by cameraphone. A week worth of roadtripping through Colorado and New Mexico ahead. (Posting will probably be sporadic -- so far my uploads aren't behaving.)

the mighty mo road show begins

There are certain things you ask a man before you marry him. Questions like: "Have you done this before?" and "are you on any anti-psychotic meds?"

And then there are the ones that slip through the cracks, like: "What do you mean you don't eat arugula?" or "you've never imagined living anywhere outside the Midwest?"

But there are others that, once the baseline of "born and raised in America" is established, are just assumed to be true.

Like Mark Twain.

Every American who reads has read Mark Twain.

Or so I presumed.

I wasn't cheeky enough to assume that every American has inhaled Mark Twain the way I did when my dad brought home volumes one and two of Twain Unabridged when I was in Junior High School.

But Tom Sawyer? Huck Finn? Given.

No. Not true. My darlin' companion -- who consumes books daily, outnumbering my weekly intake by at least three-to-one -- has never read Mark Twain. Any of it.

Which explains why his eyes didn't spark like firecrackers when I suggested -- many moons ago -- a road trip to Hannibal, Missouri, boyhood home of Mr. Twain, née Samuel Clemens. And then suggested it again. And again.

No sparks. Not a one.

Finally, I insisted.

This weekend we right that wrong: the car is packed. The Twain on tapes are at the ready. And Hannibal awaits.

With interim stops along the way.

Posting from the road.