Pilgrimage

The other day I happened to be in Hannibal, Missouri, on the broad Mississippi River, and naturally had to pay a visit to the place where the American novel was born: Mark Twain's boyhood home.

The history is expectably fascinating, but everything on the little street that also contains Samuel Clemens' father's law office and what purports to be Becky Thatcher's house looked brand spanking Disneyland new, which was a bit disappointing. The designers seem to have rebuilt to 21st century kitsch instead of restored to 19th century funkiness. As a result, the place just doesn't carry much of an air of authenticity.

Expectably, everything in Hannibal seems to be named for Twain. The Mark Twain Hotel, the Mark Twain Dinette, the Mark Twain Caves, and so on. (There's an Injun Joe Campground, but fortunately Jim of Huck Finn fame has escaped the tarbrush of commercial insensitivity.)

Other than the myriad touristy connections with the writer, the town would be just another mouldering ruin on the river.

In praise of the Chicago Botanic Garden

A riot of tulips and willows this morning at the Botanic Garden.

One of the few gifts of aging is learning to make the most of one's remaining years. Some people, generally well-heeled, build a vast bucket list and check off expensive experiences one by one. Others just discover small glories they never thought much about during their decades of striving.

For me a huge (and inexpensive) blessing has been the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe, Illinois, fifteen minutes up the road from Evanston, where I live.

It has led me to a keen interest in the details of botany as well as wildlife photography (many examples of which can be found on my other blog). After a couple of hours' visit to the Garden, I spend another hour or so looking up what I've seen on Wikipedia or the Cornell Bird Lab website. This is like taking a self-guided online college course with frequent field trips to primary sources. The whole thing whets the intellect and exercises the old bod. There's no downside.

Besides the ponds and gardens and special exhibits, the place has a lovely cafe. Often in the morning I'll have a cup of coffee amid seniors with walkers and mothers with strollers who have dropped by, often for breakfast or lunch. The menu is both reasonable and tasty.

Grandchildren love the extensive garden railway, outdoors in the summer and indoors during the winter holidays. They even stop to smell the flowers.

A year's membership is $100, which might sound expensive but considering that it includes free parking ($20 a crack for nonmembers, but $7 for senior citizens on Tuesdays), it's a bargain when you visit the place two or three times a month, as I do.

Join. Go.

Marching for the branches

This afternoon I joined some 300 demonstrators of all ages on Central Street in northwest Evanston, Illinois, my winter residence, to protest the cash-strapped city's proposal to close its two branch libraries and save about $425,000 -- really a drop in the bucket for a city with a population of 80,000.

Champions of the libraries argue that the proposal would likely result in two unintended consequences:

First, it would insult the ideal of literacy for the children of five schools -- four public, one parochial -- who live within walking distance of the Central Street Branch Library and patronize it heavily. (There is no school near the main library downtown.)

Second, it would remove a major attraction for the business districts in which the branch libraries reside. Many shoppers would take their dollars elsewhere, such as the Wilmette commercial district near its public library a mile north of Central Street.

The protesters are asking that the city allow the library supporters a year to come up with alternate financial plans that would keep open both branches. (A similar march was held at the South Branch.)

Of the several proposals, the one that sounds most sensible to me is to remove the entire library system from city ownership, instead forming a separate library district that would be an entirely new taxing body. (Most other Chicago suburbs operate their libraries in this fashion.)

The event was a remarkable turnout of book lovers young and old, and it gave me strong hope that the aldermen will vote to keep the branches open past March 1.

By the way, no buses were overturned or cars torched during the pointedly cheerful demonstration. Looting was limited to the hot chocolate machine at the Linz & Vail coffee shop, which generously provided free cocoa to sore-footed children, and at the Great Harvest bread shop, source of free cookies.

There wasn't a cop in sight, either. This was an exceedingly peaceable protest march -- it was Martin Luther King Day, after all -- and I was delighted to be in the middle of it.

Heroes

One of the benefits of visiting Rochester, N.Y., last week was a short tour of the city's storied Mount Hope Cemetery, where two of the world's most illustrious troublemakers are buried: Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony. Inspiring.

Over the top

Click photo for larger version if you can handle the bandwidth

There's a fellow in neighboring Wilmette who for many years has gone all out, balls to the wall, flank speed ahead with the front-yard Christmas decorations, and this year neither the economic crisis nor the green movement has dimmed his glory.

If you think this is spectacular, you should see his place on Halloween. When he flicks the switch to turn it on, the lights for blocks around flicker and gutter, and another reactor goes online at the Zion nuclear plant.

It's heartening that someone is brave and flush enough to forge on with his gaudy enthusiasms while the rest of the impoverished world extinguishes its unneeded lamps, although one might wish he would think about the carbon footprint he leaves.

[Dec. 18: The following YouTube video suggests that that guy in Wilmette has some serious competition. Watch it all the way to the end for the grand finale.]

Another River Street shot

Here's another pre-fire photo of two buildings that burned down in Ontonagon, Michigan, last weekend. I'm still tweaking the photos I took that day with Photomatix high-dynamic-range software, trying to make the colors pop out but not to overdo it. I'm trying to make the buildings look memorably picturesque, not like overly made up ladies of the night.