The Hopeful Romantic

Uncle Bubba sits quietly in the back seat of his cab; the cabbie was 20 minutes late and Uncle Bubba let him have it with both barrels when he finally arrived at the hotel. He called the day before to make the arrangements and now he wonders if he'll make it to O'Hare airport on time to catch his flight home. (I can tell you that he won't, but that's another story...) For now he thinks of his Sweet Pea and anxiously awaits grabbing her in his arms at the gate when he arrives at his home airport. He imagines her sweet smile and adoring eyes. He laments that he has to stay away from home for such long stretches of time and knows that it would probably be easier on him if he wasn't such a hopeless romantic. He knows he lives too much in his head and carries his heart on his sleeve, but that's just Bubbie. He knows it's to his detriment. It's a hard life but could he be any other way? To deny one's self is death; fated to be a zombie, a shell of a person walking the days away to the end of the earth.

In Bubbie's view, the term hopeless romantic is a misnomer. The term "hopeful romantic" would be much more accurate to describe a person who daydreams about romantic occasions and dreams of chances where he/she will be able to perform a romantic act to their love. The sadness that this chance never comes is the hopelessness and who wants to think about that?! All hopeless romantics are idealists, sentimental dreamers, imaginative, and fanciful when you get to know them. They often live seeing life through rose colored glasses and as a result they prefer not to be steeped in reality. The hopeful romantic knows the reality of love is that reality has no business being in love. This is why they will often perform grandiose gestures that may be seen as unsettling or borderline crazy to non-romantics. But to the fellow few romantics these same gestures will be adored as beautifully and obscenely quixotic. And such is the "hope" of the hopeless romantic--to not only find the one who loves receiving such love, but loves giving such love. The true hopeless romantic would always rather give than receive because they know then and only then, will there be true love.

Going Home

The chilly winds of Canada are sawing hard on the back of Bubbie's neck. Even with a scarf pulled up around his nape and head his skin under his layered shirts shuttered and began to horripilate; shaking off the goose flesh he knew it was time to go home. Chicago has been good to him and he knew better than to complain of the cold. He no more liked it when northern folks come to visit and complain about the heat. Home is home to folks and Uncle Bubba supposes that one ain't no better than the other, it's just what you're used to. For him it's the South. Excited to see his Sweet Pea and get his arms wrapped tight around her. For years he could hardly go a few hours without her, but in the crazy year of ups and downs he's had to bear up to loneliness. A man, broken down from the miles from home yet strong enough to overpower the selfishness to pack it in, to quit. There's Sweet Pea, a family, friends and charities that rely on him to make money, and right know, that's the bottom line. Sometimes when he weakens and his heart goes faint, his mind wanders back to the days of no regrets. He and Sweet Pea had little and needed little. An hour of gazing into her eyes flew by in seconds and he'd swim through hell or high water to rush back to her from wherever afar. But they wanted more, nice things, and they wanted their kids to have nice things too. So they slaved to make their dreams realities, at least as real and as close to their dreams as they could get. Their reliance on each other developed integrity and ethics and loyalty. They learn discipline and what worked and what didn't. And now in a crappy economy, with jobs scarce and the future of America uncertain, Uncle Bubba and Sweet Pea keep chugging along. They weather the storms together which only strengthens their bond. They stay focused and committed to one another, having the intelligence to know that the residual of their love and their joint success will fall on those around them; no need to look for it.

Now it's just a cab ride to the airport and Bubbie will be going home. In Bubbie's view, everything is no more than nuisance to him; the cold, the traffic, the people, the hectic tension of the airport; all this keeping him from his Sweet Pea.

Daaaaa Brauts!!!

Uncle Bubba has made his way to a most obscure place for a good ol' southern boy in winter; he's in the greater Chicagoland area. In the approaching inclement cold he finds himself even further from home, as misplaced as a back pocket on a t-shirt. But, he has a job in a bad economy and has learned, in his gruff and sometimes grumbling way to appreciate the subtleties of his often forced adventures; this time in northern Illinois. For the most part, outside of the ghettos, the area has a different vibe--it's almost mundane. There's a myriad of sprawling suburbs each having the air of a small town and seemingly detached inkling of the rest of the world. Bubbie noticed some intriguing examples of this, one of which he relayed to me...

It's unfathomable that hordes of husky heartlanders will stand on line, out the door--a revolving door--in cold windy weather to have a doggone hotdog! Dat's right; and in their own unique vernacular, when made with sausage it's a sassage sammich. They love their Italian Beef sammich, a local delicacy consisting of piles of spicy sliced meat in a perilously soggy bun and let's not forget Daaa Brauts! If you haven't figured it out by now, the Chicago area is, incidentally, a culinary cornucopia. As a matter of fact, in a hotel lobby he picked up a Chicago tourist guide of the best and hottest places displayed 35 of 40 pages hawking restaurants. Bubbie swears that when he lays in his hotel bed at night and the howl of the wind dies down he can hear the distant hardening of arteries.

Bubbie has forever heard of Chicago as the windy city. Often upon hearing it he admits to thinking sarcastically, "Yea right; you're in the North, its cold, what do you expect." But now that he has spent a few wintery weeks living like a native, he admits that the relentless wind has a significant stinging bite, no matter how light or how heavy. At times it hurts, it makes a colder, tougher go of things. But you don't hear the locals speak of it, they don't complain about the cold.

The landscape is relatively flat. He reckons that short of the plethora of near empty glass and steel office buildings there's nothing to stop the cold Canadian air from sweeping down yonder. Who knows, but in Bubbie's view the wind in the windy city is as viscious as a Sarah Palin with a hot-flash.

Chicago-round

Chicago is a landscape littered with revolving doors. This is an unnatural way to enter and exit a room for a simple country boy. Cited first as another big city obnoxious annoyance Bubbie's view a been altered... if just a little. He surmises that the functional purpose of the revolver is to keep the weather out. There seems to be no time in Chicago that a chilly wind isn't whistling pasted one's ears and with a revolving door, the door is never really left open. No absentminded employee can leave a door propped open and no chivalrous patron can politely hold the door open for long periods of time and long lines of shoppers. The side affects of revolving doors are the practice of patience since one must wait for each person to walk through, and politeness since, while waiting a turn to revolve, momentary decisions of etiquette are performed as to who goes first. With that comes the thought that, "Hey, I can't stop now that I've revolved or someone is going to rear-end me!" When exiting a revolving door you might hit the person in front of you if the line stops and the person behind you may suddenly be pressed against you for a second of awkward stranger relations. Your mind may be thinking, "Whoa, someone is touching me." But then, after several instances Bubbie tends to think... so what. We're all just people trying to get by. In Bubbie's view, he'll keep going around until he can get back home where a revolver is something that sleeps under your pillow.