Because
of my infamous great-grandmother, most people associate me with Missouri.
That’s just Mom’s side. Dad’s family hailed from Illinois—well, Wisconsin
before that, where the homestead was. Ireland before that.
But my dad mostly grew up in a small town in Illinois. He returned there after his stint in the army in WWII. He drove a taxi for a while, which is how he met my mom, offering her a ride home one night after she’d been pestered by a guy at the club where she’d been singing with the band.
Mom and Dad married in 1947, and Dad got a job on the local police force. A family story we heard repeatedly as kids was the time Dad got a call on his radio to Be On the Look-out for a two-year-old boy who had wandered away from his home on such-and-such street. My dad responded immediately and found him, blocks from home, walking with his dog, headed downtown. He recognized the boy right away—because it was his son, my oldest brother, Danny.
My siblings were born back there, but Mom and Dad moved to California just before I was born. When Dad passed away in 1963, Mom piled us in the station wagon and we drove back there to see all the aunts and uncles, all the cousins we would never have the opportunity to grow up around. And damn, they were good people, even when we were kids, accepting us, playing with us, as if we’d lived there all along. I was only nine years old, but I do remember that. That, and the small-town feel of everyone living within a short distance of each other. One night we’d be at Uncle Chuck and Aunt Betty’s house. The next night we’d be at Uncle Mo and Aunt Lee’s. Lots of Irish people. Lots of Italians. Lots of food. Lots of love. That’s what I remember.
Now, most of my cousins, except for a couple of them, have moved out of that small town, but they still live close enough to gather often. When my sister and I visited in 2018—my first time back there since 1963—there they all were, gathering in my cousin Mary’s home to hang out with us, just as they had 55 years earlier—as if we’d been there among them all along. Lots of food. Lots of love. Lots of stories to share. My cousin Donny drove us around town, pointing out where various people, including our grandparents, had once lived, and Fort Sheridan, where my dad would’ve been inducted into the army. All of it still there, all these decades later. Gotta love that small town life.
Recently I spoke with my cousin (by-marriage-but-who-cares) Stephanie, who told me about how the town still had that small-town feel. “I’m so near-sighted,” she told me, “I wave at everyone. This stems from an incident in my childhood when a neighbor called my mother and accused me of being rude because I hadn’t waved back at her. I just hadn’t seen her. Ever since then, I wave at everyone.” She went on to say there was a particular young man in the neighborhood who used to ride by on an electric scooter, blaring loud music. Stephanie and her husband worried about him being hit by a car. She always waved at him. “One day,” she said, “he actually waved back.”
You know, having been born on July 4th, I’m a sucker for a Fourth of July parade. We have one here in the park, though it’s a golf cart parade—no marching bands, but if the local fire department isn’t on a call, they show up and roll through the park. It’s always fun. This year I watched with my neighbors, then got in the car to go look at a typewriter I wanted to buy. I had to veer off the road and send out a frantic text message, though, as soon as I turned on the radio and heard there’d been a mass shooting in Highland Park, Illinois.
Highland Park. That small town where my parents met and married. Where my dad had received commendations for his service with the p.d. Where my siblings were born. Where my cousins, Kathy and Donny still live, and Stephanie just blocks away in Highwood. That boy she always waved to, the one that finally waved back, turned out to be the shooter.
Like me, Stephanie and her husband have always loved a Fourth of July parade, have always gone to the one in Highland Park with friends. “It’s our tradition,” she told me. This year, their friends could not attend, and Stephanie and Joe made a last-minute decision not to go. It may have saved their lives.
I asked her what the atmosphere in the town was like since the shooting, how people were coping. She told me she’d worked with one of the victims who died, that people were raising funds for the survivors, that Highland Park had been big on helping people during the pandemic, so once again the citizens dove in to help out. Lots of food. Lots of love.
This is small town life. Or was. As we’ve seen, small town life may never be the same again. There is—was—that sense of safety and security that everyone talks about when everyone in a town has lived there long enough to know everyone’s parents and grandparents: “That kind of thing doesn’t happen here,” the mayor of Highland Park said. She believed that… up until the day it did happen there. Be mindful. And, I hate to say this part, keep your eyes open and your wits about you. Because if it could happen in Highland Park, Illinois, it could indeed happen anywhere.
