The Corona Diaries Vol 13: Vernal Musings

March 2021

I have been consuming Chicago-related media lately. The Frau and I watched Judas and the Black Messiah recently.

It's a movie about Fred Hampton and William O'Neal. As you can imagine, it was a very intense story and it featured some wonderful performances. I don't know a whole lot about Hampton and I’m sure the film took many liberties with the historical record, but it was still a great watch.

I will admit to being taken out of the story a few times when street scenes just didn't look like Chicago. Later I discovered that it was shot primarily in Cleveland.

The other bit of Chicago entertainment lately is the impending release of season 2 of Bronzeville, a radio drama set in 1940s Bronzeville, Chicago.

When it premiered a couple of years ago, Laurence Fishburne was the only lead actor whose name I recognized. It's a lot of fun with characters trying to get by. Some are involved in the underground lottery while others go the straight route. There's racism, corrupt cops, and just plain human drama.

I am planning on listening to season 1 again in preparation for the new episodes.

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About this time last year I figured that I had reached a certain age and income level and thought it was the appropriate time to commission a piece of stained glass. Besides, I thought, the people who makes stained glass could probably use a boost with everything being closed and the pandemic building in strength. So I hired a woman named Kristy at The Vinery. It was finally finished in December – I guess they weren't hard up for work, after all – and I recently hung it in one of my windows.

The Green Man is highly appropriate here in the early days of spring. I am looking forward there being some leaves in the tree outside this window for extra green. In a couple weeks or so I will be getting a new cat tree that I'll place beneath it so that our cats can take in some fresh air and enjoy the view of the birds building a nest just out of reach of their sharp and highly dangerous claws.

Hopefully the Frau and I will be able to get to England sometime soon where we will tour a church or two that have some Green Man architectural ornaments. Plus I'd like to pretend that I remember more than a couple bits of trivia from those medieval church lectures I attended. I will dazzle the Frau with my commentary – "Here we are in the narthex!" and "Let's have a seat on one of these here misericords." Afterwards we can retire for an ale at a pub called The Green Man. I understand that they exist outside of movies like The Wicker Man.

My wanderlust has been stoked this month by a couple podcasts. Two weeks or so ago we got a few inches of snow. While shoveling, I was listening to an episode of the Ideas podcast from the Canadian Broadcasting Company called "I Travel Therefore I Am: The Philosophy of Travel". It was hard not to dream about being somewhere else as I cleared the sidewalks of what will hopefully prove to be the last snow of the season. There was a lot about travel broadening the mind and the like discussed. Not long after this another podcast I like, The Medievalist Podcast, had an episode called Travel in the Middle Ages which only made my desire to hop on a plane more intense.

I suspect this is why I've been drinking English style beers lately. A friend of mine who spent time in London during his college years adores their ales so we are always on the lookout for a fine mild or bitter. Or porter, for that matter. He lent me his City Walks: London cards and I've been looking over them lately.

There are 50 cards in the set and they each describe a walking tour of an area of London. They're 4"x6" and you get a map on one side and a description of the walk with nearest Tube station locations on the other. Pretty neat.

But since London is still on the back burner, the Frau and I are planning on going to the Upper Peninsula this summer. We'll be staying at a hotel called the Fitzgerald on the shores of Lake Superior. Plus we'll be down in Chicagoland as well in 2021.

I took a day off in the middle of this week and did a little walking. On my trek at the Acewood Conservation Park, I saw a smattering of mallards and lot of Canada geese.

I also spied a robin but failed to get a snap. I heard red-winged black birds but didn't see any. They all appeared to be high up in the trees and I didn't have my binoculars.

I then went to another conservation park – Heritage Sanctuary - nearby that I'd never been to. The trails were covered in snow but the rest had mostly melted.

The story goes that, when the area was being developed in the early 70s, a neighborhood gardening club petitioned to save some of the wooded area. It is renowned for its trove of trilliums so I intend to return in couple months as they are in full bloom in May or so says the Internet.

I saw a red bellied woodpecker on my walk but was an epic failure at trying to get a photograph.

On my way home I went by the Alexander Smith House which is only a couple miles from us. I've always known it was old as it sits on a large lot and, well, it looks like an old house. But it was only recently that I learned that it was built in 1850.

The Frau is going to Nordstrom today with a friend and it looks like it's going to reach the 60s so it's a good bet I'll be going out on a bike ride.

The bonus photo this time is of some life-sized Minecraft figures in someone's yard down the street from us. Minecraft is a video game. The youngest was totally enamored of it when he was young.