September 10, 2008
We had lunch last week, for the first time since the kids all went back to college (and Anat to medical school). Janet and Marty both showed up, and Dad invited a guy he met through mentoring, who is a retired education professor at Loyola. Barney was an interesting guy, very amused about Grandpa lunch, but he is overweight and dropped crumbs all over his lap as he ate, which was distracting. I have so much going on right now, with the law center opening tomorrow, and the Bar Mitzvah a week from Saturday, so I wasn’t able to write anything.
Today, we met at Prairie Grass, which is once again acceptable now that they fired the guy who was rude to Grandpa last year when he asked for a decaffeinated soda. Janet, Milton, and Marty all came, but Mom was busy at the Holocaust Museum. Dad walked in with two new people, who he has been talking about excitedly, because they dug a 300 foot hole in their yard and now heat/cool their home with geothermal energy.
Dad has been trying unsuccessfully to explain it, but it didn’t sound that believable, especially in this area. Amazingly, it turned out that Bill and Rona live over on Dauphine, just blocks from here, and they really did what Grandpa said! Rona is clearly the force behind it; she described herself as someone who researches decisions carefully and does nothing half-assed.
She nearly gasped when I told her I just bought a dress for the Bar Mitzvah, which is in less than two weeks. Bill seemed a lot more laid back, calm, and was as riveted talking about his healing practice as Rona was about geothermal energy.
He actually owns a title company; and is a grad of DePaul College of Law, another name for my alumni list, and he met Grandpa in the locker room at Bally’s, overheard him telling a joke and couldn’t help but join in. He was interested in Grandpa’s mentoring, and thought his joke was funny; and of course Grandpa loves getting to know strangers. But on the side, and perhaps one day as his full time job, he has the gift of being able to diagnose certain medical problems, and to sometimes cure them with touch. A rare and amazing gift; hard to believe, and I wonder if he even mentioned it to Grandpa.
They are both the kind of people we see all the time; nicely dressed, attractive, polite and educated. She is small and dark, filled with energy, while he speaks at a slower pace, and seems to listen more to what we were all saying. At some point, because I learn a lot from the question, I asked what shul they attended, and the answer is that they are not very connected to the Jewish community.
We were all interested in hearing about the process they went through to discover geothermal energy, and we all focused in on the cost/benefit analysis Rona gave us. She is absolutely enamored of the process, but it isn’t something I would ever do in our house, because the outlay was about $22,000, and that’s after she changed all the windows to 3 panes. Yes they save money, but you have to stay in a house much longer than we plan to in order to make it cost effective.
So at that point I wanted to hear more about them as people, and less about how they made their house better. Marty also likes to talk about improvements to his house, and ultimately, the discussion is about nesting. Even though Rona hopes to convince numbers of people to use this system, it is very expensive and only available to a certain segment of society. Milton said that it was an interesting concept because of all the buildings…but questioned if the technology was available. Apparently there is a hospital somewhere in the west suburbs that is converting to geothermal….of course to the tune of over 4 million.
I piped up that my very first editorial, regarding the environment, is being published in the Northbrook News, (I’m SOOO proud!) and explained that it gives kudos to Congressman Mark Kirk for his push to clean up Lake Michigan. I wanted to bring Janet more into the conversation, and that would be something she would enjoy discussing, but they didn’t seem all that interested. Nor were they interested in asking anything when I told them that Janet’s passion was in lobbying. Bill asked “for what?” she replied, “Israel”, and the conversation frittered away with Marty checking into her status as professional or non-professional lobbyist.
So, I asked Rona if there was anything else about which she was so passionate, or anything that she had been passionate about before this came along. She told us about raising their autistic son, now almost thirty, and how it had left her little time for outside interests. She had dabbled in Mahjong, but truly geothermal energy was the thing that motivated her. Neither Bill nor Rona asked questions about us, but Milton left just as dessert came, and then Janet and I pursued a conversation with Bill, and there was more give and take.
I saw Bill looking closely at Janet, and was worried that he was seeing something wrong….I had to interrupt, as if blocking him from saying anything would stop whatever he saw. He told a story about noticing something wrong with someone’s foot, and pointing to it and immediately the pain subsided. Then he asked if Janet had nightmares as a child. He apparently didn’t hear me when I explained that Janet doesn’t remember ANYTHING from her childhood. But she surprised my by saying she remembered being upset at the Speck slayings, and I remembered too, that we had strategized about what we would do if a crazy homicidal person came into our house. We were definitely going to be the ones that hide under the bed and are spared.
Bill kept looking at Janet, and I wondered what having nightmares as a child was showing up as in her now. Grandpa and Marty were still chatting about geothermal energy with Rona. But it got so late, we finally all left. Nice people.
We had lunch last week, for the first time since the kids all went back to college (and Anat to medical school). Janet and Marty both showed up, and Dad invited a guy he met through mentoring, who is a retired education professor at Loyola. Barney was an interesting guy, very amused about Grandpa lunch, but he is overweight and dropped crumbs all over his lap as he ate, which was distracting. I have so much going on right now, with the law center opening tomorrow, and the Bar Mitzvah a week from Saturday, so I wasn’t able to write anything.
Today, we met at Prairie Grass, which is once again acceptable now that they fired the guy who was rude to Grandpa last year when he asked for a decaffeinated soda. Janet, Milton, and Marty all came, but Mom was busy at the Holocaust Museum. Dad walked in with two new people, who he has been talking about excitedly, because they dug a 300 foot hole in their yard and now heat/cool their home with geothermal energy.
Dad has been trying unsuccessfully to explain it, but it didn’t sound that believable, especially in this area. Amazingly, it turned out that Bill and Rona live over on Dauphine, just blocks from here, and they really did what Grandpa said! Rona is clearly the force behind it; she described herself as someone who researches decisions carefully and does nothing half-assed.
She nearly gasped when I told her I just bought a dress for the Bar Mitzvah, which is in less than two weeks. Bill seemed a lot more laid back, calm, and was as riveted talking about his healing practice as Rona was about geothermal energy.
He actually owns a title company; and is a grad of DePaul College of Law, another name for my alumni list, and he met Grandpa in the locker room at Bally’s, overheard him telling a joke and couldn’t help but join in. He was interested in Grandpa’s mentoring, and thought his joke was funny; and of course Grandpa loves getting to know strangers. But on the side, and perhaps one day as his full time job, he has the gift of being able to diagnose certain medical problems, and to sometimes cure them with touch. A rare and amazing gift; hard to believe, and I wonder if he even mentioned it to Grandpa.
They are both the kind of people we see all the time; nicely dressed, attractive, polite and educated. She is small and dark, filled with energy, while he speaks at a slower pace, and seems to listen more to what we were all saying. At some point, because I learn a lot from the question, I asked what shul they attended, and the answer is that they are not very connected to the Jewish community.
We were all interested in hearing about the process they went through to discover geothermal energy, and we all focused in on the cost/benefit analysis Rona gave us. She is absolutely enamored of the process, but it isn’t something I would ever do in our house, because the outlay was about $22,000, and that’s after she changed all the windows to 3 panes. Yes they save money, but you have to stay in a house much longer than we plan to in order to make it cost effective.
So at that point I wanted to hear more about them as people, and less about how they made their house better. Marty also likes to talk about improvements to his house, and ultimately, the discussion is about nesting. Even though Rona hopes to convince numbers of people to use this system, it is very expensive and only available to a certain segment of society. Milton said that it was an interesting concept because of all the buildings…but questioned if the technology was available. Apparently there is a hospital somewhere in the west suburbs that is converting to geothermal….of course to the tune of over 4 million.
I piped up that my very first editorial, regarding the environment, is being published in the Northbrook News, (I’m SOOO proud!) and explained that it gives kudos to Congressman Mark Kirk for his push to clean up Lake Michigan. I wanted to bring Janet more into the conversation, and that would be something she would enjoy discussing, but they didn’t seem all that interested. Nor were they interested in asking anything when I told them that Janet’s passion was in lobbying. Bill asked “for what?” she replied, “Israel”, and the conversation frittered away with Marty checking into her status as professional or non-professional lobbyist.
So, I asked Rona if there was anything else about which she was so passionate, or anything that she had been passionate about before this came along. She told us about raising their autistic son, now almost thirty, and how it had left her little time for outside interests. She had dabbled in Mahjong, but truly geothermal energy was the thing that motivated her. Neither Bill nor Rona asked questions about us, but Milton left just as dessert came, and then Janet and I pursued a conversation with Bill, and there was more give and take.
I saw Bill looking closely at Janet, and was worried that he was seeing something wrong….I had to interrupt, as if blocking him from saying anything would stop whatever he saw. He told a story about noticing something wrong with someone’s foot, and pointing to it and immediately the pain subsided. Then he asked if Janet had nightmares as a child. He apparently didn’t hear me when I explained that Janet doesn’t remember ANYTHING from her childhood. But she surprised my by saying she remembered being upset at the Speck slayings, and I remembered too, that we had strategized about what we would do if a crazy homicidal person came into our house. We were definitely going to be the ones that hide under the bed and are spared.
Bill kept looking at Janet, and I wondered what having nightmares as a child was showing up as in her now. Grandpa and Marty were still chatting about geothermal energy with Rona. But it got so late, we finally all left. Nice people.
