One big happy.

To the stated complaints of a few of my Facebook friends, I’ve cut back on my once-weekly excoriations of Mitch Albom. I just felt like I was running out of things to say about him, and it started to feel like a waste of time. But what the hell, he’s still out there, writing and collecting a fat paycheck. And so here I go.

Mitch on Sunday:

I recently visited my wife’s family in Mexico.

“You’ll stay with us,” they said.

“Which of you?” I asked.

“All of us,” they said.

At first, I thought this was a language barrier thing, the way these particular relatives say, “I love you too much” (translation: “so much”), or the way they pronounce “Meetch.”

But as it turned out, when they said “all of us” they actually meant “all of us.”

They live in the middle of Mexico City.

In a family compound.

Let me start by violating my three-paragraph rule for quoting others’ work, but when you pad out your Sunday column with white space and all those one-sentence paragraphs, you’re asking for it.

And let’s also set aside, for now, the stupid and offensive joke at the Mexicans’ expense for calling a different pronunciation of “Mitch” a “language barrier.” Because I’m hoping that once the guy leaves the family compound, they have a good laugh at how he pronounced “huitlacoche.” In fact, I hope they served him some. But I digress.

Mitch, it turns out to the surprise of not one sentient being who read the first few lines, thinks family compounds are the best:

It’s such a loving, embracing environment, that inevitably, I wondered, “Why don’t we live this way in the States?’”

And then I remembered.

We used to.

Yes, we did. It was not uncommon, once upon a time, for children to sleep four to a room and grandma to have a little room off the kitchen. We lived that way for one reason: Because more people were poor, and there was no safety net, and anyone who thinks it was all fun and games should talk to the people — 99 percent of them female — who bore the brunt of all that loving and embracing. Because it came with a lot of cooking and butt-wiping, too. Mitch’s wife must come from some money in Mexico, because the compound he’s describing — four walled houses sharing a common inner courtyard — is not exactly the way the rank and file lives in North America’s largest Third World city. So let’s allow there’s a goodly amount of loving and embracing there, with the harder work left to maids.

Finally Mitch gets around to acknowledging maybe family togetherness isn’t all beer and skittles, with this:

According to the 2010 census, 4.4% of American households are multi-generational. That’s up from 3.7% 10 years earlier, or about 1 million households.

I’m guessing it is because of the economic downturn, foreclosures pushing families under one roof. But it’ll be interesting to see once we get used to having grandmas and grandpas and cousins and in-laws around, how fast people will want to disengage.

My guess is, they’re going to want to disengage pretty damn quickly. I’ve known my share of big families sharing small spaces, and it left me with a new appreciation for a room of one’s own with a door that closes. And those were only large mom/dad/kids families. Add some in-laws and grandmas, and I don’t see how anyone stays sane.

But of course, the ultimate irony to all of this is Mitch Himself, a man who has apparently made the choice to remain childless. He married his girlfriend after Morrie Schwartz persuaded him to make a little more time for non-work life, but it never went further than that. From time to time he’ll write about his nieces and nephews, but if he has any regrets about not increasing the Albom family through birth or adoption, he only shares them when he’s envying someone else’s arrangements, and even then he doesn’t seem to get it. Why don’t families live together anymore, he whines, without noting that he never let anything other than work guide his decisions.

I hear he has a big house. He could take in a few family members, if he’s missing ’em so badly.

And there’s a one-sentence paragraph for you.

Oh, my, more rain today. A beautiful day yesterday, but I had to work. Today I filled the prescriptions for the eyedrops I have to start taking two days before my surgery, which brought it all home a bit more. Along with the typos. And the testiness about Albom.

But for now, let’s let this all go. And get some bloggage:

Big language warning on this, but worth your time for some of the excellent obscenities trotted out to abuse this InfoWars dipshit, caught trying to do a standup in Boston by a passerby. Who had his own camera. And let him have it: I’m the smart guy, because I’m not telling people the FBI blew up the Boston Marathon, you fucking shitheel.

I’m thinking that story is going to get the Boston Globe at least one and maybe several Pulitzer Prizes this time next year, and one might be for this great tick-tock in Sunday’s paper.

Although I also liked this piece from the Sunday NYT, on the thwarted dreams of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, and how readily the hole in his heart was filled by the radical posing he pursued next.

And now it’s on to Sunday evening, pork tenderloin on the grill and “Mad Men.” Let’s have a good week.

Posted at 12:12 am in Current events, Media |
 

52 responses to “One big happy.”

  1. Brandon said on April 29, 2013 at 12:56 am

    Big language warning on this….

    Since when did this site get all demure about language?:)

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  2. Brandon said on April 29, 2013 at 12:58 am

    Also, good luck with your surgery.

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  3. ROGirl said on April 29, 2013 at 6:21 am

    Now that the Weekly Reader has ceased to exist, Mitch could very easily fill that gap with his columns.

    Good luck with your surgery. Over the years I have thought about getting lasik surgery and have always chickened out.

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  4. alex said on April 29, 2013 at 7:06 am

    My brother got Lasik. Eventually it gives out and your eyesight goes to hell again, but with permanent scarring on your lenses that creates visual disturbances on top of your myopia.

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  5. coozledad said on April 29, 2013 at 7:31 am

    It does my heart good to watch that barely sentient cock-headed idiot get the spit treatment. That’s what a well done cussing out looks like. The fucker is shocked that words and sentences can be looped together to casually inform him he’s grown up useless.
    The whole self-fucking right needs to hear this kind of abuse daily, until it finally occurs to them that it would have been a good idea to learn how to read instead of trying to crawl head first up their daddy’s ass.

    Speaking of which, my dad’s family had something like that multi-generational cohabitation thing going. They didn’t get out much except to snake loaves of bread and gawp at people with shoes. The prosperity of the postwar era enabled them to drift apart and build brick Stalinist chicken shacks to fill with their own snotty bairns.

    Absent this development they would have killed each other horribly.

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  6. beb said on April 29, 2013 at 8:00 am

    So up-side of Nancy’s surgery is that it will be a good excuse for her to stop reading Mitch Albom. Ought to lower her blood pressure a little as well.

    As much as Nancy hates the one-sentence paragraph, it’s actually a remnant of early journalism. Back in the day when newspapers were printed from hand-set metal type, the easiest way to edit a column for length was to pull out whole parapgraphs and move the sticks of type up. The shorter the paragraphs the more control one had over length, and thus the birth of the one sentence paragraph. Of course with everything electronic these days one does all the copy-editing before the text is ever transfered to the printing forms. Albom’s one sentence paragraph may be annoying but they’re just an older tradition.

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  7. Kim said on April 29, 2013 at 8:34 am

    Cooz, and here I thought you’d traveled to Boston to give the InfoWars guy a verbal beat-down.

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  8. coozledad said on April 29, 2013 at 8:54 am

    Kim: I haven’t got the balls to do that, unless I’m drinking, and I haven’t been that drunk in a couple of decades. That guy’s a pro.

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  9. adrianne said on April 29, 2013 at 8:57 am

    Just when you thought you were out of it, Mitch pulls you back in, Godfather-style!

    Son No. 1, hubs and I spent a pleasant Sunday in NYC tooling around the Cloisters, Rockefeller’s tribute to all things medieval, in Fort Tryon Park, upper-upper-Manhattan. My favorite parts, besides the unicorn tapestries, which Son No. 1 is doing a paper on for medieval history, is how the artists of the Middle Ages managed to incorporate so many of their patrons and friends in the scenes from the Bible that they illustrated. These were not iconic images, but individuals playing the role of the Virgin Mary, etc.

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  10. Dorothy said on April 29, 2013 at 9:16 am

    Much like husbands who sometimes get pangs of empathetic labor pains, my eyes sting just thinking of the (not lasik) surgery you’re going to have. Will be thinking of you and crossing my fingers (but not my eyes) for a smooth and pain-free recovery. I know it’s a couple of days out but still …. no time like the present.

    Has anyone else here seen “The Intouchables” yet? We saw it at home Saturday evening. What a great movie! I trust Entertainment Weekly for movie suggestions and lately the results have been kind of 50/50. But this one was a grand slam. See it if you can – it’s French if that matters to anyone. I managed to finish binding off a knitted scarf even though I had to keep an eye on the subtitles the whole time.

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  11. Deggjr said on April 29, 2013 at 9:43 am

    It seems that Mitch Albom is singing his own version of ‘What do the simple folk do?’.

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  12. jwfromnj said on April 29, 2013 at 9:54 am

    I thought It was Coozledad too.

    It was a decent cursing out, and I shared It with friends. The consensus (as Jersey boys not too enamoured with Beantown) was despite all the Boston Strong talk, if that guy had pulled that in midtown Manhattan a week after 9-11 he would have been beaten to a pulp.

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  13. MarkH said on April 29, 2013 at 9:56 am

    Nance, we had grilled pork tenderloin for Sunday dinner as well. One of my favorites, along with the huge salad and veggie variety.

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  14. MichaelG said on April 29, 2013 at 11:00 am

    Very nice verbal abuse directed toward a deserving subject. I liked it.

    And Albom never fails to live down to expectations.

    Here’s an excellent take and explanation for the delays that result from ATC furloughs:

    http://fromthecontroltower.blogspot.com/

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  15. brian stouder said on April 29, 2013 at 11:14 am

    OK – one last time and then I’ll really, really try not to keep gushing about Isabelle Wilkerson’s marvelously good book The Warmth of Other Suns.

    Mitch Albom could learn a thing or two (or three hundred) from that altogether engrossing narrative. I just finished it this past weekend on the front porch*, and Mitch’s “and then I remembered; we used to” line made me laugh out loud!

    Ms Wilkerson’s sweeping book reads like a non-fiction counter-point to Gone With the Wind – which itself is the most glittering example of the sort of “history as it never really was” that a maudlin hack like Mitch appears to aspire to – even as he misses precisely what those Americans he presumptuously refers to as “we” aspired to, as they struggled to find their footing in cities like Detroit or Chicago or Milwaukee or Philadelphia or New York.

    That is to say – a place of their own.

    Anyway – unless I absolutely cannot do it, I have every intention of catching Ms Wilkerson’s presentation in Chicago this fall. Her book is the best and most affecting thing I’ve read in years. She captures so much, and the three people she specifically follows – more or less simoultaneously – through the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st puts everything she presents in human terms. If the word “we” comes up in her narrative, it isn’t just for effect.

    After finishing that book (and I’m not ashamed to say – with a smile on my face and tears in my eyes – it took up residence on the top-shelf of our book case, displacing a lesser book (Meacham’s TJ book).

    I cannot offer higher praise

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  16. brian stouder said on April 29, 2013 at 11:17 am

    *on the porch – and thankfully free of any but immediate family!

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  17. adrianne said on April 29, 2013 at 11:22 am

    Brian, I was blown away by “The Warmth of Other Suns” as well. A must-read! I’m grateful for Ms. Wilkerson reminding people why there was such an exodus from the South. The answer, sheer terror for black people, would surprise some folks.

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  18. Dave said on April 29, 2013 at 11:34 am

    Mitch didn’t know they lived in a compound like that? What, were they distant cousins?

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  19. Charlotte said on April 29, 2013 at 11:42 am

    Twenty five years ago my aunt tried to save my indigent mother by building a family compound. She bought two flats on in Andersonville (before it became “Andersonville”) in one of those big old six flat units. Put my mother and my grandmother on one side, and her family on the other — worked great for about 18 months — shared dinners, my grandmother did the laundry, everyone pulled together — then my mom started drinking again, and picking at her mother, and by year 4 she’d blown the whole thing up and moved out in a huff. My grandmother did, however, live with my aunt for the rest of her life, and for the most part it worked pretty well. She was a tough nut, my grandmother, but she wasn’t destructive. They all wound up on our family farm south of DeKalb — my grandmother, my aunt and her husband, my younger cousin in the house on the other side of the property with his wife and little girl. It’s no idyll, but it works.

    Speaking of mental illness and families — here’s a heartwrenching piece about schizophrenia in one family, and how the Ohio branch managed to save their daughter, while the California branch couldn’t save their son: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/04/mental-health-crisis-mac-mcclelland-cousin-murder?page=1

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  20. BRIAN STOUDER said on April 29, 2013 at 11:56 am

    If I was the editor at the Sacramento Bee, I’d respond to Governor Perry of Texas thusly: Nuts.

    http://www.chem.info/news/2013/04/perry-hits-back-booming-business-cartoon?et_cid=3223551&et_rid=44004269&location=top#.UX6SSrXqle8

    (as it happens, the editor is responding more fully, and doesn’t seem to be caving! So now I know what Fox News, et al, will be squawking about)

    The lead:

    AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Gov. Rick Perry said Friday he’s disgusted a California newspaper ran a cartoon that depicts him boasting about booming business in Texas, then shows an explosion, a week after a fertilizer plant explosion killed 14 people in a Texas town.

    And the cartoonist’s excellent reaction:

    “My job, as I understand it, is to be provocative,” Ohman wrote. “I provoke, you decide. I don’t dictate, I put out my opinion along with everyone else. I sign my name. I own it. In my opinion, I could have gone further. Much further.”

    (Click the link to see the cartoon, which is quite good!)

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  21. Jolene said on April 29, 2013 at 12:00 pm

    Brian, you and other fans of Wilkerson’s book might be interested to know that our friend, Mr. Coates, is writing about the housing policies that evolved in northern cities following The Great Migration.

    His blog has been quiet lately as he works on this story, but he has provided a list of his sources. Might be some interesting follow-ups to the Wilkerson book among them.

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  22. brian stouder said on April 29, 2013 at 12:52 pm

    Jolene – your link gave me the slip, but I’ll search for Mr Coates’ list this evening.

    At Christmas, I specifically wanted Rachel Swarn’s book about Michelle Obama’s family – American Tapestry; and Ms Wilkerson’s book (owing to a C-SPAN show that featured them both).

    Luckily, I read American Tapestry first. It’s a good book – but it simply would have been anti-climactic to have read Ms Wilkerson’s magisterial (and no less lyrical) book first, and then capped it with American Tapestry – a book whose aim was more specific.

    Gotta love those C-SPAN live hookups from book fairs on grassy areas here and there around the country!

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  23. Jolene said on April 29, 2013 at 1:04 pm

    Not sure what i did wrong, Brian. Try this.

    http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/04/the-ghetto-is-public-policy/275294/

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  24. coozledad said on April 29, 2013 at 1:35 pm

    jolene: Housing projects in the south often adjoined old plantations. One of the projects on Old Oxford Highway in Durham was only a couple of miles from the plantation site, and was populated heavily with the descendants of the slaves of the Camerons. Fairntosh had several thousand slaves, so it’s no surprise a lot of the black kids I went to school with were Camerons or Hedgepeths:
    http://www.opendurham.org/buildings/fairntosh?full

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  25. coozledad said on April 29, 2013 at 1:41 pm

    I’d forgotten that Fairntosh had a Doric shithouse.

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  26. Hattie said on April 29, 2013 at 2:54 pm

    God I love this. Now I am going into the bathroom to puke.

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  27. Deborah said on April 29, 2013 at 3:11 pm

    Nancy, I’ve been trying to imagine what it must feel like to know you have that surgery and recovery in front of you. You seem to have it under control, good for you.

    I’ve been taking a hiatus from commenting, no particular reason, just didn’t have anything to say. I have been reading some books I’ve neglected and spending as much time outside as possible. I’ll be leaving to go back to Santa Fe in couple of weeks and will probably stay there until after labor day, because of the beginning of construction in Abiquiu. I will be taking our aging cat there with me as my husband has a lot of business travel scheduled during the summer months. I always worry how the cat will be able to take the travel and change of her normal routine but we don’t really have any choice.

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  28. Jenine said on April 29, 2013 at 3:22 pm

    “Numerous farm buildings, overseer houses, houses of enslaved people, and other buildings were added during the mid-19th century.” Interesting to see the phrasing “enslaved people”. It’s new to me and clunks on my ear but I’m going to try and use it. It makes more explicit that their condition was not inherent but imposed on them.

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  29. Prospero said on April 29, 2013 at 3:49 pm

    Louis Gohmert (non compos mentis, TX) is convinced that the fertilizer that blew up the fertilizer was “dark-skinned” and entered the USA illegally.

    That Cambridge guy’s well-oiled stream of invective reminds me of this.

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  30. MichaelG said on April 29, 2013 at 4:01 pm

    The SacBee’s editorial page editor replied to Perry basically telling him to go pound salt, that the cartoon was meant to illustrate the lack of regulation and inspection in Texas. Perry has been in California lately trying to recruit business to move to Texas. Gov. Brown had a few choice words for Perry as well.

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  31. brian stouder said on April 29, 2013 at 4:01 pm

    Deborah – always good to hear from you! Is your husband getting close to when he can also retire (the better to spend his days with you, rather than travelling all over)? A guy I work with now sees retirement on the horizon, and he has purchased property in southeastern Tennessee…

    Sort of the reverse-migration thing, that a certain sort of northern white guy would find appealing.

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  32. Deborah said on April 29, 2013 at 4:07 pm

    I should add to my comment at #27 that one of the books I’m catching up with is “the Warmth of Other Suns”, and that Wilkerson was speaking in Santa Fe while I was there last time and I was completely oblivious to it, and now I will probably miss her in Chicago too. It has become very apparent to me how Chicago has neglected the south side and how that is a big problem. Hopefully, The Obama’s will help that situation. Many here are hoping that the Obama library ends up here, on the south side, probably associated with the University of Chicago.

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  33. brian stouder said on April 29, 2013 at 4:14 pm

    Agreed; if the Obama library ends up anywhere else besides the south side of Chicago, it will be a major disappointment.

    btw, State Senator Obama pops up toward the end of the book, at one of Ida Mae Gladney’s neighborhood watch meetings. Watch out for Ida Mae as you read that book; she’ll get into your heart

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  34. Deborah said on April 29, 2013 at 4:17 pm

    Brian, thanks for asking but my husband says he will never retire, he says he wants to die while doing a drawing for a building, way off in the future of course. He will be spending more time in NM this summer though because one of his upcoming projects is in southern California and it will be closer for him to go back and forth from Santa Fe than Chicago. Although he has a couple of projects starting up in Chicago too, so I’m not sure how he’s going to juggle it all. We’re just happy he has work when unfortunately so many architects are struggling.

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  35. brian stouder said on April 29, 2013 at 4:30 pm

    When the day comes that I can retire, that’s it – lights out! – s’long folks, it’s been good t’know ya. (Although I’ll still go to the school board meetings, I believe)

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  36. Prospero said on April 29, 2013 at 4:55 pm

    MO state senate is run by looney tunes.

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  37. Kirk said on April 29, 2013 at 5:21 pm

    Brian @20:

    I (and Nancy) knew Jack Ohman when he was too young to buy a beer legally. Worked here in Columbus back in those days, but made more money than any of us because he already was heavily syndicated. He’s always been a good cartonist, though his style has evolved quite a bit over the years.

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  38. brian stouder said on April 29, 2013 at 5:27 pm

    Kirk – that guy sounds like the Real Deal!

    I loved his “I provoke. You decide”

    very refreshing, indeed

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  39. LAMary said on April 29, 2013 at 6:14 pm

    Deborah, what do you think of the Bush library? I mean the building, not its contents. Have you seen photos?

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  40. Deborah said on April 29, 2013 at 6:51 pm

    LA Mary, the Bush Library was designed by Robert A.M. Stern, a relatively “famous” NY architect. I actually met the guy once at Rizzoli’s bookstore in Manhattan when he was there for a book signing in the 80s when I happened to be there on a business trip. I bought his book for the library of the architecture firm I worked for at the time and asked him to sign it with that in mind, he was very gracious. My husband thinks it is one of the better designs for a presidential library. I have only seen photos online. I am less impressed by what I have seen of the design of the exhibits in the library (since I do exhibit design, I feel I have more credentials to be critical). I will have to look up who the exhibit designer is, I should really know already, a bit embarrassing that I don’t know that.

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  41. Deborah said on April 29, 2013 at 7:09 pm

    OK I looked it up and the exhibits at the Bush Library were designed by a company called PRD (Planning, Research, Design) out of Virginia. I have to admit I have never heard of them before. Their portfolio is so-so. My guess, they probably were the lowest bidders. The architect, Stern probably was hoping Ralph Applebaum or Edwin Schlossberg (Caroline Kennedy’s husband) would have gotten the job of exhibit designer of his museum.

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  42. MarkH said on April 29, 2013 at 7:50 pm

    “I provoke, you decide”.

    “…refreshing…”, Brian?

    That is dictionary definition editorializing going back to the stone ages.

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  43. Rana said on April 29, 2013 at 8:22 pm

    My reaction to the family compound nostalgia is to wonder about the circumstances under which said family members make a living. Isn’t that the main reason, aside from privacy, that most younger people move out? That they have to leave their home communities to find work? And, if not, how exactly is the family commune supporting itself?

    I will admit it’s nice having family relatively (heh) close to hand, both because of affectionate ties and for practical reasons, but that’s a far cry from sharing a household. Even the one family I know that kinda-sorta has a “compound” – parents, and adult child with spouse and kids, living in two houses on adjacent semi-rural lots on a shared back road – maintain separate lives the majority of the time.

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  44. Suzanne said on April 29, 2013 at 8:31 pm

    Adrianne @ 9. I’ve visited the Cloisters and it’s a truly wonderful place, as is Fort Tryon Park. The view of the Hudson is breathtaking. I kind of made a fool of myself when I saw the very famous unicorn tapestry saying that “I didn’t know that was HERE!” Anyone who visits New York should make the effort to visit, as it is worth the trek.

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  45. Kirk said on April 29, 2013 at 8:55 pm

    Brian, Nancy and other current and former Fort Wayne residents:

    We sat next to a friend and her mother-in-law at a hockey game on Saturday. The friend used to work for the News-Sentinel. Making conversation, I asked her mother-in-law whether she lived in Fort Wayne. “North Fort Wayne,” she said.

    Is there a separate municipality by that name, or any other reason you know of for her to make that distinction? Or was she just telling me what part of town she lives in?

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    • nancy said on April 29, 2013 at 9:06 pm

      Certainly not that I know of. Probably she just meant the north end, which could be…what, exactly, Brian? North of Coliseum?

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  46. Dave said on April 29, 2013 at 9:46 pm

    No North Fort Wayne, wonder where she lives? I live North Fort Wayne myself, yes, north of Coliseum.

    Nancy, Brian, anyone, what was it those folks wanted to name their municipality out in Aboite when they were trying to avoid being annexed into the city? West Hamilton or something like that?

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  47. nancy said on April 29, 2013 at 9:50 pm

    It was, indeed, West Hamilton.

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  48. Kirk said on April 29, 2013 at 10:31 pm

    Thanks. Just curious.

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  49. brian stouder said on April 29, 2013 at 10:34 pm

    I agree that if you’re north of Coliseum (or US-930), then you’re certainly in north Fort Wayne…but there may be a style question at play here. If a person gets shot north of State Street (a main east-west more or less across the middle of the city) and east of Lafayette/Clinton (the main north-south route through the center of town) then the papers were generally label that a shooting in the ‘near Northeast’…and in that way, the label “southeast Fort Wayne” (where I grew up) can be made to cover all sorts of shootings and mayhem, even when it isn’t very far south, or east.

    And by the way, as for those Aboiters who didn’t want to be part of Fort Wayne – ask them how their incompetent, subpar, and altogether undependable privately held water utility worked out, last summer.

    Lots of folks out there bitch and moan about the City of Fort Wayne and annexation and all the rest…but their complaints would be raspy and their clothes (and their persons) would be smelly if the City of Fort Wayne had not come to their rescue last year, and turned on the clean water. And now – now! – some of them (especially on WOWO radio) are bitching and moaning about how their incompetent and inadequate “Aqua Indiana” water utility got condemned and taken over by Fort Wayne City Utilities, and how it’s just not right, and that Aqua Indiana needs to be paid lots and lots of dollars.

    It would almost be worth it to see the City of Fort Wayne tell those people to go to hell…..and Hell itself probably has cleaner more dependable water then their ridiculous Aqua Indiana ever did

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  50. Dexter said on April 29, 2013 at 11:01 pm

    I was born and raised in DeKalb County but Fort Wayne was where Dad and Mom banked and shopped and took us to restaurants, and where Dad worked for years in The Gettle Building downtown, so I witnessed the changes in Fort Wayne the past 57 years or so, since I started remembering things.
    Maybe in the 1950s if someone said “North Fort Wayne” they would mean north of State Blvd. Now, I suppose folks think anywhere south of Glenbrook Mall and US 930-Coliseum Blvd. would be considered “inner city” more than a separate section of the city. I think “North Fort Wayne ” might mean a distinction from west-end upper-middle-class Aboite as well as the inner city, which I defined more broadly than old-timers would have.
    I bet “North Fort Wayne” would extend north to Hathaway Road and even a little north of Union Chapel Road. That is generally where Fort Wayne area north housing additions stop and old-style farms dominate the landscape.
    I lived in Fort Wayne many years ago, and both places I rented, one on close-in West Washington Blvd. and one on Wagner off Spy Run were dangerous, crime-ridden areas. There was no hope for you if you left even an old cassette tape on a seat. You would have a broken window in the middle of the night. Wagner Street was like the goddam Wild West. Gunplay in the opposite duplex apartment drove me the hell out of there before I got fully moved in. Whoa! Fuck dat shit. KA-BOOM went the shotgun. Damn thing was LOUD.

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  51. Minnie said on April 29, 2013 at 11:19 pm

    Nancy, here’s hoping for a successful surgery and short recovery for you. There will be lots of good wishes hovering around you.

    After a hiatus of more than a decade, I’ve started a new garden. My back thinks I’m crazy.

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