Siblings and a mother's love

From the beginning (of the series) I have watched a television program named Better Call Saul with some interest.  Initially I was simply intrigued with the character of Jimmy McGill and his evolution or “de”volution, into the Breaking Bad character Saul Goodman. -- Then they introduced us to Jimmy’s older brother Chuck.  Older brother,…. I had three of those,… now absorb this fact: all of my brothers were older than I by the measurement of a generation –they were adults long before I was born.

Chuck and Jimmy? They made me think of my mother’s son.  He was 26 years older than me.  He passed away, not long ago,…and some of you may be aware that we were,…for lack of a better word: estranged.  After our mother died I did not hear from her son, my half brother.  At one time in my life I called him “brother”, and I did that proudly.  At the same time he called me “HALF –sister”, at that time I shrugged off that label.  But that changed later.

So when Chuck says, “I made Mom proud” –well that was absolutely true for my mother’s son –he made her proud.  It’s a fact; I know it, his children know it,…. anyone who paid attention to our mother knows it –he made her proud and there was love in that.

And, much like Jimmy, I made (our) Mom laugh.  I was her friend, in the end.  Mom and I,….we were like each other’s “significant other” in many ways.  Let me explain….  You see, my Dad died when I was a kid.  It was just my mother and I for several years after dad died.  Then she married again, and there was another party present for quite a few years,..but that did not change our understanding of each other –mom and I.  And after her husband passed away, Mom came to live at my house.  Mom lived with me full time, and we had blast.  And her son, my half-brother felt that; he knew that we were close in a way he could never broach.  
I know that what I experienced with my (our) Mother was special…it was just the two of us for so many years. We talked to each other every day for more than 25 years.  There was no way that her son, who was an adult and lived in another state could possibly achieve what I had with our mother.  She was my friend, my mother, a kind of significant other,….we had inside jokes for crying out loud!  We were girlfriends! We shopped together, we watched television together,….and because we were mother and daughter we were inseparable.

I wish that everyone could have that with their mother or their father or both of their parents. That friendship and those kind of good times.  But I digress…..

As I stated a few paragraphs ago, I have watched the story play out, of a pair of siblings, with great interest….  “George made Mom proud. I made her laugh.”

George, you are gone now, so I cannot say this to your face,….  

Mom loved you so much. Mom was proud of you.  Mom did not have a favorite –the woman loved to brag about her children –BOTH OF US. 

You made her proud, and I made her laugh,… but there was always love in her heart.

(Any suggested similarity between television characters mentioned and my brother and myself ends at the sibling connection,... beyond that there is no resemblance between the afore mentioned fictional television characters and my family.)

Random memories of childhood

I am just going to ramble here,.... riffing,.... but thinking way back in history, when I was wee tot....

Riding in the back seat of the car.... in a booster seat that looked like this:

This is what it looked like, only it was black with salmon pink patterns on it.  Notice that there is no strap or belt, no cushioning.... I am pretty sure that there were no seatbelts in the back seat of the car,... so this was unsecured.  The intention, I believe, was that I would be able to see out the car window if I was sitting on the booster seat.

If we went into town, where there were parking meters, there was a baby food jar full of pennies in the glovebox of the car.  I was allowed to take the penny, and hold onto it, until we got out of the car and arrived at the parking meter..... I think my dad must have lifted me up, so that I could put the penny in the meter.  

I remember going to the bank, because there was a special platform for little kids to stand on to see the teller.... it was a little, portable staircase with a wide platform at the top.  And there was a security guard who had lollypops in his pocket.  I almost always got a green lolly-pop.

I also remember going to the lawyer's office.... (red arrow indicates approximate entrance)

the inside of the lawyer's office was wood panelled with knotty wood, and he had a large marlon on the wall.  Things a little kid remembers......

My Dad saying, "Let's go for a ride.",.... and his eyes, looking at me in the rear view mirror, "sing for me."  And he would drive and I would sing... the abc's, and whatever other songs I could think of,... and if we went very far I would start over again with the abc's.  When Dad said we were going for a ride he usually had a destination in mind,...some friend's or relative's house.... seems like wherever we went someone was home, and they were happy to have a visit.

I can remember riding home from Uncle Carl and Aunt Eleanor's house,... down their street I could see the second floors of the houses, from where I sat in the back seat of the car.... after we turned a couple of corners we could go faster, and then I would look up and see street lights -along Manheim Road, passing the entrance to O'Hare Airport.   Or the long ride to our summer house on the Chain Of Lakes.... it took an hour to get there,...following one of 5 or 6 different routes... My dad liked to follow different routes, he had wanderlust that way....

Summer evenings going "for a ride" and seeing beautiful sunsets,... staying too late,..lightning bugs alight in the warm summer evenings as we would climb back into the car to head for home......hushed in the back seat of the car, listening to my parents talk about things they had discussed with whoever we had been visiting....

Quiet summer Sunday nights, eating ice cream and watching the Lawrence Welk Show....
Winter evenings at the greenhouse,..watching variety shows... having to go to bed at 8:30pm, and listening to the television from my room....across from the living room... the television droning me to sleep, as my Dad sat in the recliner and slowly fell asleep himself.... the National Anthem playing in the wee hours, just before the broadcast day ended...hmmmmmmmmmmmmm--the endless drone of the test pattern, and my mother's voice: "Jim,...Jim, wake up and come to bed..."

George

.....
George A. Tagge, we shared a Mom; he was my half-brother. He passed away on May 29, 2017.

George Allen Tagge was born in September of 1934, to Lillian (1918-2005) and George “Jock” Tagge (1914-1968).  They lived in Arlington Heights, Illinois when he was a small child.  His mother put a harness on him, and attached the cord to the clothes line, so that he could spend time outdoors, we can surmise that he was some kind of escape artist at the age of 2, otherwise why was he on a leash? Actually he was grateful to have been able to spend the time outdoors.

From some time during his 2nd or 3rd year he lived with his maternal Aunt, Mamie (Mae) and Uncle Pete (Elmer) Stade, and grew up for several years with their two boys, Peter and Leroy. They lived in Maine Township. Around age 12 he returned to live with his mother, Lillian and her second husband, Jim Scheiden.

George attended Maine Township High School (now known as Maine East).  He also graduated from DeVry Technical Institute in Chicago.

George was married to Laurelle Hasselmann (March 1955) and they had two children Gail and Bruce.  They lived in Urbana, Illinois until 1964, when they moved to Satellite Beach, Florida.  In 1975 they moved to Cincinnati, Ohio.  They divorced after 25 years of marriage.

He worked for PanAm, and was involved with NASA in some capacity.  I have no details.

George was married to Claudia Horner in the early 1980’s until the time of his death. They lived in Kentucky.

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I won't go into a lot of detail here, but suffice to say that George and I were never close.  It is a fact that I told our Mother, many years before her passing, that when she died I would probably never hear from George again.  (Over the last 12 years we have emailed less than 7 times, only regarding deaths in the family. We have not spoken or otherwise been in contact with each other.  This was his decision, I was prepared for it and I did not take it personally. I made peace with this a long time ago.)

There were details that I was unaware of at that time.  (I won't make those details public.)

Here are the facts:

George's parents, Lillian and Jock, were married to each other.

Lillian loved her son, very much.  I need not argue this point, because his children know that his mother loved him, and that is all that matters.

His mother was very proud of him.

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Here is a link to the funeral home obituary:  George A. Tagge, 1934-2017

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Please direct condolences to his wife, children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren.

colorized photo

shutting down the disco ducks...

Okay, bear in mind that this is me riffing.... just an off the cuff blog post brought on by sharing a tune with a friend.....

This about shutting down the "disco ducks",... two young dudes who lived across the street and three houses down... 

1980, warm day, sun shining.... I have fairly new HUGE stereo speakers... and an expensive 14 watt receiver, hooked up to a programmable turntable with remote control.... It's an impressive setup for someone my age at the time.

I am in my bedroom, which is what I call a bowling alley,...it's a room approximately 11 feet wide and 17 feet long...it was once the one-car garage of this ranch home.  A brick house, reddish bricks faded to a pink shade.  I was probably watching television, or reading.....

Down the street these two young men decide that it's a lovely day to play frisbee outdoors...in the street.  Unfortunately they also think that it is a good idea to play disco on the radio of their van. Yes, the kind of Chevy Van with a bed in it....I guess, I wouldn't really know, because these were exactly the kind of boys I stayed away from.   So, they are out there tossing the frisbee, with the disco noise cranked way up, as loud as it probably would go.

No way! I think, no f**king way..... not on my street!  I take my big-a$$ speakers and put them in the windows, facing the street.  The speakers fit perfectly into those windows....
And I take out my Styx album: Pieces of Eight.  I put that vinyl on the turntable, 
BOOM!! 
ROCK AND ROLL BABY!!!!

Styx: Pieces of Eight

I started with the volume on the receiver set about halfway up.... and went up in increments until the disco ducks packed it up and got into their crappy van and drove away.  Then I turned the volume down to a more acceptable level for indoor listening, and put my speakers back on their stands.

ROCK AND ROLL RULES!!

May 26, 1979,.... O'Hare Airport, Chicago, Illinois ..... a terrible tragedy

I will never forget that day.  It was a beautiful day, actually,...until mid-afternoon...On this date (May 26) in 1979.....  I had driven a friend to a job interview, and I was waiting in the car.  Turned on the car radio in time to hear:  "and the plane crashed at O'Hare,..more later".... I shouted, "wait!!" and started trying other radio stations for news.....  I quickly gave up, got out of the car and started for the door of the building....  My friend's dad was flying in from Iowa that afternoon, and as you have read I had NO details, other than "plane crashed at O'Hare".

As I ran up the door opened and my friend, Ann, came out.  "Plane crash at O'Hare." I shouted and we both started running to my car.  I told Ann what little I knew... We had to get to Ann's house and find out what we could from her mom, an alderman in our town.  Ann had recently finished her first year of nursing school and was anxious to see where she might go to help out, once we had learned from the radio that it was an outbound flight -her dad was to be inbound.  . I also had a friend from work who was flying to California that day, but I had no idea that she had flown out that morning.

I drove as quickly as I could within the bounds of speed limits --trying to not go more than 3 or 4 mph over the speed limit.  The closer we got to Ann's house, the more traffic we encountered.  They were detouring traffic off of Higgins/Touhy northward on Lee Street, which was the street we were using to get to her house.  Anyway, we did not have much of a delay, pulled into their driveway, jumped out of my little car and made for the front door.  The door opened before we reached the front porch, Ann's mother in tears, said quietly, "no survivors."  Both Ann and I gasped, and started to cry as we followed her mother into the house.... she filled us in with more details (what little they knew at that point).  Then I headed home, all the way looking to the west and then southwest, at a dreadful column of ugly black smoke that rose from the wreckage

Once home I turned on the television news to live coverage of the crash, --the plane had crashed and exploded into flames in a field.  It was just a few hundred yards short of the Oasis Trailer Park, where thousands of people lived.  By the grace of God only a few of the trailers in the trailer park only sustained damage.

272 people died instantly, because an engine fell off of the wing of the plane as it took off from a runway.


A couple of days later I drove over to the area of the crash,.... Touhy Avenue was still closed.... I crossed it on Mount Prospect Road and drove down old Higgins Road, into an industrial area,... it was not possible to get closer, nor did I want to get closer once I caught that terrible scent,.... one I will never, ever forget,..burned human flesh and jet fuel.


It was a horrible tragedy, and I will never forget it.



The Chicago Tribune --link to their coverage.....


NTSB article: the investigation and reasons for the crash of Flight 191




I always remind myself that air travel is safer because of such tragedies.... every plane crash is analyzed by scientists and the NTSB, and they learn from it, and improve the way planes are built and maintained.

we are.... melted into air, into thin air (dream or nightmare?)

How strange are my dreams….well, last night (this morning?) I had the usual fare….

I was with my dog, and it really was my Joss in the beginning.  I was putting her harness on her and picking her up off of a sofa….getting ready to take her outside.  I cannot describe the interior of the house at all, but the layout was the house I grew up in –in Des Plaines, Illinois.  But not exactly that house.  Then again, it’s a dream so things are kind of fuzzy in the periphery.  I go out the door with the dog, but then she becomes part of that fuzzy periphery.

Next I am with a young man, and we are outdoors doing some kind of yard clean up.  We are gathering sticks and weeds to remove them from the yard.  Now this is not the yard of the house I grew up in, this house is out in the countryside.  It makes me think of my cousin’s house and yard in Crystal Lake, but that is not the location either.

The young man and I start walking around the house, to the south of it.  There are trees and shrubs and then there is a wolf…. I would say wolf and not coyote, because this is a very large animal.  The young man tells me to just keep walking, don’t pay the animal any attention.  Now I am carrying a pair of blue jeans, and I turn to face the wolf and try to hit with the blue jeans, extended the pants and lashing out at the animal, as it gets closer and closer.

Now the wolf is gone, and I holding hands with the young man.  I ask him if he thinks I put the dog inside the house and closed the door tightly.  He tells me that I probably did put the dog in and close the door and lock it.  We pass through a doorway, that is like the doorway to the breezeway of the house I grew up in, except that there is no breezeway, we are going outdoors again.  I had no idea that we had gone indoors.  And just like that the young man lets go of my hand and slips away, and he is gone.

There is my mother, opening a coconut –like that is an easy thing to do… and I am glad that we have the coconut.  We are in a kitchen that I do not recognize.  Mom opens that coconut and easily scoops out what she calls the meat of the coconut –easily –as if it were coconut oil in solidified form.  And we start to eat the coconut, which must be chewed as if it were actually the “meat“ of the coconut.  It’s good.  And then I wake up.

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Nothing weird about it? I suppose.  Here is an explanation of where some of that came from:

The dog—I watched Mad About You last night, and it was the episode where Murray, the Buchman’s dog, gets dognapped by Nate the dog walker.  Nate puts a red coat on Murray the dog, my Joss wore a red harness. 

The young man – well, yesterday I did spend some time communicating, via Messenger, with my friend M. and I was thinking about someone else.  I also thought of some of my nephews, young men.

The house I grew up in --- need I say more? I grew up there, for 20 years, it’s a part of who I am.  I guess I did think specifically about that house – 2 days before the dream.

The locale and the fact that it changed—I don’t know. I did think about my cousin’s property in Crystal Lake in the last couple of days.

The wolf – a friend shared information on Facebook about what to do if you are out walking and you encounter a coyote,..that was yesterday.

Beyond that I do not know,… why a coconut? Your guess is as good as mine.

Just don’t give me that dream analysis baloney, because just like I did here, I can usually figure out where the components of my dreams began. --- What the mind, in sleep, does with all of it – welcome to my own personal Twilight Zone.

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“We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.” -- Prospero, The Tempest Act 4, scene 1, 156-158

(reference: https://www.enotes.com/shakespeare-quotes/we-such-stuff-dreams-made)

The Stuff that Dreams Are Made Of... 

Movies of the 1970s.... (that I saw in theaters)

I have great memories of movies from the 70's. My mom and I would go to the movies on Saturday, and I would be so stoked after seeing one movie that we would go see another,... and sometimes we out on Sunday afternoon for another!! Great movies, and great memories!

I wrote the text above the day I read the article this excerpt is from:

“When James Caan, who played Sonny Corleone in The Godfather, appeared in Cannes this week, he delivered a stinging slap to modern Hollywood. “Most of the films they’re doing, in Hollywood anyway, are these franchise films,” he said. “I’ve become very negative about the films of today… I was very fortunate in the 1970s to work with the best actors, the best directors, and the best cinematographers.”

One might, perhaps, be tempted to dismiss it as the nostalgia of a veteran actor for his own glory days, except that many other leading figures in cinema seem to share his view. Caan’s latest film, Blood Ties, is set amid organised crime in 1970s Brooklyn – almost as though its director, Guillaume Canet, yearned to dive back into the era and the city that spawned that decade’s gritty masterpieces, from Mean Streets to Serpico.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/10076153/Hollywood-has-never-matched-the-gritty-masterpieces-of-the-1970s.html

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Today I did some research, and made a list of movies that we went to the theaters to see… I compiled my list from this link after reviewing the first 350 movies on their seemingly endless list…..

http://www.imdb.com/search/title/?release_date=1970,1979&title_type=feature

To begin with I read the teen magazines (16, Tiger Beat, Spec, etc.), which initially were passed down by one of my older nieces.  So, in my memory the first movie I asked my mother to take me to see was Romeo and Juliet http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063518/  starring Len Whiting and Olivia Hussey, in 1968.  I was a child, and my mother asked me several times if I was sure I wanted to see this movie…. I think I was 8 years old.  My mother was totally mystified by my request, nonetheless she took me to see the movie, at a movie theater that used to exit on the north side of the Randhurst Mall shopping center in Mount Prospect, Illinois.  I of course had no clue what this movie was going to be, I just knew that I read about and it was a “must see” movie.  I LOVED IT!! Kind of adult themes, if you think about it, but I understood it enough –I knew that Juliet was not really dead, and I was horrified to realize what Romeo was doing.  My first introduction to the power of love.  I am not sure, in retrospect, whether to be happy or horrified that my mother took me to see this movie before I was even 10 years old.  But that was the real beginning of my intense love of movies and actors.  And when I say “actors” that, for me, encompasses any actor: female or male.

It is absolutely true that occasionally we would see one movie as early in the day as possible, and then travel to another movie house and view a second movie in the same Saturday.  And then see another movie on Sunday….

The listing I reviewed, prior to this writing, was only the TOP 350 films released between 1970 and 1979, so there are a plethora of movies that we saw in theaters that I don’t have on my list.  Of course some movie titles remind me of other movies we saw, so it will follow that I will include movies not on that particular list here.

And I agree completely with James Caan:  “the 1970s ….. the best actors, the best directors, and the best cinematographers.” The BEST movies, because they just don’t make them like that any longer.  That is why I am writing this. I am so grateful to my mother for indulging my need to go to the movies, and to see more, more, more movies.  And at the same time, looking at that list of 350 films –we saw only a handful! It boggles the mind.

From Paper Moon to Blazing Saddles and Young Frankstein,…. The Panic in Needle Park to Billy Jack to The Way We Were…. we went to the movies and saw a great cross-section of what Hollywood was churning out, and every one was a new story, there was no predictability, it was mind-boggling and amazing.

Tatum O'Neal as Addie and Ryan O'Neal as Mose Pray (Paper Moon)

A lot of Robert Redford movies, but that was the era when he made the most movies…. And I was obsessed with him for a time…. It was my mother’s own fault.  Us girls wanted to see a rather violent, gritty movie called The Seven Ups (starring Roy Scheider) ,… but the mom’s thought that was too violent. They chose to take 2 thirteen year old girls to see The Way We Were,.. adult themes and a simulated sex scene!! And Robert Redford looking so damn gorgeous in that white Naval 

uniform…….. (I never let my mother forget it!)  I was in love! 

Barbra Streisand as Katie and Robert Redford as Hubbell (The Way We Were)

For the next 3 or 4 years I purchased every magazine and newspaper I could find with anything about Robert Redford in it.  4 scrapbooks later, sometime after Three Days of The Condor, Redford slowed down and I was older, I lost interest,…. I still love him, but I grew up.  But along the way mom and I thoroughly enjoyed The Great Waldo Pepper, Downhill Racer, Jeremiah Johnson, The Candidate, All the President’s Men, The Sting, and the gorgeously filmed all-star The Great Gatsby, which will always be my favorite movie, right after Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid.

Here is a portion of my list: One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Jaws (masterpiece!), American Graffiti, The Towering Inferno, Bad News Bears, What’s Up Doc, For Pete’s Sake, Going In Style, Jesus Christ Superstar, A Time To Run, MASH, SPYS, The China Syndrome, Gator (Burt Reynold’s follow up to White Lightning), Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, The Cowboys, Billy Jack, Earthquake, Airport ’75, and so many more…

Terri Garr as Inga, Gene Wilder as Dr. Frederick Frankenstein, and Marty Feldman as Igor (Young Frankenstein)

I even talked my mom into taking me to see some movies that gave her pause,…. Harry & Tonto –I was 13, I told her it was about an old man and his pet cat –that was true! But there was some pretty graphic language, and adult themes, ….   The Panic in Needle Park, “but mom, Al Pacino is in it.” and I will still argue that it was a good idea for me to see at the age of 14 – it’s all about heroin addicts, and it is graphic and it is gritty and realistic in portraying an addict as a person who will sell their soul for the drug.  (I never did more than smoke a little grass, and I credit this movie with scaring me off of drugs forever.) …. And Dog Day Afternoon, when I was 15, but mom was still objecting to the language, and what she saw a hero worship of criminals. And I saw Pacino’s character, Sonny, as pathetic.  But I did love the films of director Sidney Lumet.

Al Pacino as Sonny, and John Cazale as Sal (Dog Day Afternoon)

Have I switched to director’s? yes, off the top of my head: Sidney Lumet, Sydney Pollack, William Friedkin, David Lean, Blatty, Coppola, Scorsese, Hitchcock (of course), Ridley Scott, and Steven Spielberg….

Again, I am thankful that my mother took me to the movies almost every weekend (between 1972 and 1976)…..because:

That's Entertainment!