Holiday a time to make memories
Independence Day offers family, community celebration
From the bright shades of potted petunias of spring to the mass of golden black-eyed Susan in the fall, our front yard is usually awash with the colors of the season and is a visual signal to visitors as to where we are. Those three U.S. flags staked to flowerpots can also tell anyone who we are.
Along with millions of others, Independence Day is the explanation we use to get together with family, watch parades and marvel at fireworks. The holiday is the high noon of summer; a spell of long hours of daylight where we can plan trips and enjoy the season.
The annual Park Forest parade has run past our son’s house on Lakewood Boulevard and it was there where we saw state Sen. Barack Obama march in 2003. Memory recalls that through the years we saw both Gov. Jim Thompson (Republican) and Sen. Paul Simon (Democrat) in local parades.
Our viewing area has also given us a front-row seat through the back door for the fireworks display in Central Park.
I love the day. I enjoy the camaraderie and the get-togethers. The national holidays are the only times in which a wear a blue polo shirt emblazoned with the flag symbol under the words “PARK FOREST.” It was purchased at the old Jewel Foods store on Orchard Drive during the village’s 50th anniversary party in 1999.
Almost all our ancestors were immigrants seeking a better life. Some came to escape tyranny and poverty, although others, to our everlasting shame, arrived in chains and shackles while those who were here when the first boats arrived were too often stripped of both land and dignity. Everyone’s story is different. My father, for example, was a prisoner in a Siberian prison for nine years, digging coal by day and wearing a ball and chain on his leg at night; an impediment that created a lifelong indentation on his left leg. Freed by the Russian Revolution of 1917, he traveled through Mongolia, Manchuria, China and Japan before hopping a freighter for Canada where one of his six brothers lived.
He probably never waved a flag, never set off a firecracker, and I never heard him sing a patriotic melody. His song was that all are created equal and he sang that tune every day of his life, never giving up on his dream.
Salon Artists Gallery
When we last got together, we wrote that the 15 artists who displayed their works at the Salon Artists Gallery on Main Street all voted to keep the co-op site open as a tribute to the late Pat Moore, who died in early June.
Alas, that promise, obviously an homage to its founder, could not be kept. Pat Moore signed all the contracts, from insurance payments to sweetheart utility deals with the village.
“Due to the nature of the Gallery itself the members have found that we are unwilling to sustain it without her leadership,” was posted on the Gallery’s webpage. “Thank you for being there for us. The Gallery is currently closed to the public and will be locked permanently on September 30, 2022.”
Street talk
Early riser that I am, the loud thumps of the massive excavator gouging deep trenches up and down our street at 7 a.m. and the crash as it deposits massive chunks of concrete into adjacent dump trucks on our street do not disturb me.
There is now a rectangular crater where once the lip of our driveway merged with the street, so for the time being we park the car on a nearby roadway. This is all is well and good because, for the first time in the 57 years we have been in our house, a portion of our street is being repaved.
Other streets in the village are on a shortlist of projects funded through the Rebuild Illinois program. Hopefully, your street will be the next one to be rebuilt.