Sunday Drive in Kane County

Illinois 25 more or less follows the Fox River in Kane County, sometimes hugging it closely, other times not. It's a drive of considerable variety. Yesterday, for example, south of Elgin and north of St. Charles, along a section of the road that's still semi-rural, I saw a dwarf coming out of the gentlemen's club.

But that's not what this posting is about. It can't be, because it was only a glimpse. I was driving and couldn't really turn my head. As I said, that section of route 25 is semi-rural, but not so rural that at one point it doesn't sport a gentlemen's club whose name I didn't catch. On Sunday afternoon at about 5, there weren't many cars in the parking lot, but there was a dwarf. I'm certain of that. He might have been wearing a tux. I'm not certain of that it. I imagined that he worked there, for no good reason except the seeming formality of his clothes. Even more irrationally, I thought, "Their bouncer is a dwarf." Immediately I re-considered the notion. How useful would a dwarf be as a bouncer, unless he was packing heat?

There I go again, making erroneous assumptions based on irrelevant aspects of another human being. Let's say, then, he wasn't there for a dwarf toss, or anything else so demeaning. Not that I thought about dwarf tossing while driving by, though I am now. Anyway, let's say he owned the place. I don't want to belittle -- I mean, demean -- short people.

We didn't go looking for dwarfs on Sunday. We went to see a windmill. We saw that, and more -- the Fox River nearly out of its banks, the estate of a millionaire who had Frank Lloyd Wright work for him before he was called Genius, a run down formal garden, a moderately pleasant Japanese garden, a collection of bird eggs and samurai armor, and displays about Francis Bacon and cryptology. And a room with a tin floor that housed monkeys at one time. More on these things as the week unfurls.