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friends

Weekwander

I spent a week in Chicago (or started out there) to gather with old friends, some from grade school, some from high school, and one (my friend and Best Man Art) from Kindergarten. I rented a smallish car (a 2024 Corolla Cross, which I had not heard of before) and Art and I forged west to the town of Galerna, in northern Illinois on the Mississippi River. My old friend Rich (whom I met in third grade, as best I recall) has a place there. For three days we drank wine and ate cheeseburgers, played whiffle golf around Rich’s substantial house, watched the stars from his front porch, and laughed our asses off over old stories of school, The Fox Patrol in Boy Scouts, college parties, the Resurrection Hospital dish room, where most of us worked at one time or another, and much else. Rich took us all (there were six present) on a pontoon boat tour of Galena Lake near his house.

I’ve read in many places that bonding with friends is one of the best ways to keep your brain cells alive and functional, and now that we were all in our 70s, I took great comfort in that. Rich has been holding these gatherings for almost 20 years, and (especially in the last 10 or 12 years) the group has shrunk from 15 or more down to seven or eight, of which a couple couldn’t make it this year. Each time one of the group passes on, we plant a tree on the slopes of the hill near Rich’s house in their honor.

After we returned from Galena, I visited with my father’s youngest cousin Mary Ellen, and her daughter Mary Kate. They’ve been friends for a very long time, and both helped me piece together the Duntemann family tree back in the ‘90s. We laughed and remembered old times, like the freshman ROTC Military Ball that I was required to attend, and did, with my cousin Mary Kate on my arm. She was a beautiful girl (still is, in my eyes) and I hope it wasn’t a sin that I quietly neglected to tell anybody that she was my cousin, including all my nerdy friends who attended the ball alone.

Honor is good. I honor all my friends, alive or dead, as I will as long as I’m here in God’s beautiful and extravagant creation—and maybe beyond.

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The day I flew back from Chicago (October 2nd) was our 48th wedding anniversary, and Carol and I celebrated and had a nice dinner out together. Again, friendship underlies our relationship, and has always done so, across our 48 years as spouses and 55 years as best friends. Friendship, as I’ve said many times here and elsewhere, is the cornerstone of the human spirit, the anchor to which all other positive forces that act upon relationships are anchored. Marriage works—if you work at it, as Carol and have always done and will always do.

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Some time back I was threading my way through parts of the Scottsdale-Thunderbird shopping plaza where I don’t often go, and saw that the restaurant Casa Greeka was evidently closed. My guess is that COVID did them in, as it did in so much else. Their theme was Mexican-Greek fusion. I never ate there, but I did wonder what people of Greek heritage thought of the name. The proper name would (perhaps; I’m not Greek) be Casa Greco.

But it got me thinking about food fusion for a bit. How about this: A restaurant specializing in Irish-Hawaiian fusion, called Lovely Houlihan’s. Don’t fret if you don’t get the joke. It’s for old people.

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Yes, it’s true: I’m finally closing in on the last bits of my new novel, The Everything Machine. It’s the cornerstone Drumlins story, and will reveal (most of) the mystery behind the thingmakers and the alien minds that created them. If you must genre-tag the novel, I call it a Space Western, with a side order of airships and a whiff of Dieselpunk. Should come in between 120,000 and 125,000 words, which is 25,000 words shorter than The Cunning Blood. After I get that published, I’m going to work on nonfiction for a bit, starting perhaps with a Square One introduction to Windows programming with Lazarus/FreePascal, drawing on my parts of The Delphi 2 Explorer. I already have 7,000 words on that book, which I set aside in 2021 when I began The Everything Machine. There’s a lot to cover, especially for a beginner audience, and I don’t know how long it will be. I won’t know (as usual) until I finish it. Wish me luck.