This is the shocked reaction of my friends when I tell them I plan to retire in Hillsboro in a little more than three years.
“You won't last a year before you get bored with watching sunsets and come blubbering back to Chicago with your tail between your legs,” they say sarcastically.
I have lived more than half my life in big cities. My first urban experience was Saigon when it was a combat zone in the 1960s. (And after Saigon, no American city has seemed that menacing.)
But increasingly I miss the sunrises and sunsets in Kansas plus the slower—and less expensive—way of life. The idea of someday talking to a Hillsboro real-estate agent and asking to be shown some fixer-up houses costing less than a hundred grand and knowing they will not roll on the floor laughing has considerable appeal to me.
Teenagers are not normally part of my world. But in the past month I have had two important encounters with the under-20 crowd.
Liz Born is now 17 and recently graduated from North Side Prep—an elite magnet school with a strong arts program. I have known her since she was small enough to sleep in an improvised bassinet that we made from a dresser drawer when her parents, Dan and Mary Born, were visitors in my home a long time ago.
She had a one-woman art show June 9 at the Morpho Gallery on the north side of Chicago. I volunteered to help serve food and run errands.
She had hundreds of pieces of her whimsical grotesques on display, ranging from lobster ladies to Mayan warriors. As they sold, she put a red dot on the frame. By the end of the evening she had sold more than three quarters of them—thus selling more in one evening than Vincent Van Gogh sold in his lifetime.
Even I bought a small painting of a Mayan warrior who has a nice uniform and a few extra arms.
The grassroots movement to re-elect George W. Bush to a third term as president is catching fire. But its success is dependent upon citizens moving quickly.
First, the 22nd Amendment to the constitution must be repealed. This vengeful amendment written after Roosevelt was elected to four terms in the White House can be repealed quickly if Congress and the state legislatures act now.
Evolution has been in the news lately. Three Republican presidential candidates shyly raised their hands to say they did not believe in evolution in a presidential debate last month. This past week, Senator Brownback wrote a vigorous op-ed diatribe denouncing evolution in the august pages of the New York Times.
The second oldest joke in America goes like this. A young boy is taken to the barn and shown an 8-foot high stack of manure. He immediately takes a pitchfork and starts digging into it frantically.
When asked the cause for his energetic digging he says, “Well, with this much manure, there must be a pony in there someplace.”
