Elmers Past

After Lilly came home in the afternoon I took both kids off to Trader Joe’s to buy the things that grocery chain does well. It’s a bit of a drive, so we only go once every three or four weeks. But it’s worth it for the shredded pork with barbecue sauce, in the convenient one-pound tub, if nothing else. We got two tubs. They’ll last about a week. Lilly will have some in her lunch box several times in that span.

Then McDonald’s. By special request of daughter no. 1 for about a week now. She has a way of wearing me down like that. But at least dinner for the three of us was only about $6. Two kid’s meals, both with hamburgers, and since Ann wasn’t interested in her burger much, I pirated it for myself.

It was so warm that we stopped in a park on the way home, a square block in Arlington Heights whose formal name I can’t remember, but it’s a few blocks from the town’s commuter rail station. It has lush landscaping, a central fountain, and a small but small-child-friendly playground. Meaning that nothing is too high, and there’s a cast-iron fence on three sides, the better to keep the whelps out of the street.

Elsewhere, near the fountain, I noticed a set of named bricks as part of the pavement. Usually, this sort of thing is for sale: give some money for a certain cause, often the rebuilding of a place, and you get your name on a brick. These names are probably worn away by the elements over a half-century, and in the meantime almost everyone ignores them.

In this case, the park board for Arlington Heights decided to honor themselves — or at least all of their predecessors. Every past member of the park board from its creation on June 9, 1925, had a brick with his or her name and years of service. There was clearly room for more bricks, so in that way the board members who decided to honor their predecessors had themselves in mind as well.

I was fairly occupied with minding Ann, but did have time to read some of the names, and note a couple of trends, minor and major, reflected there. Minor: No fewer than two board members in the 1940s were named Elmer. Even if there were no Elmer Fudd, I suspect that name would have passed from fashion — in fact I suspect it had passed for little boys by the time these men were grown and on the park board. Major: The first female board member took her seat in 1972. After about 1980, the board seemed about half male and half female.