Matt had a fire at his rental house, so he moved in with Ula Joe, a Texan who worked for The Trust. The Trust was an entity which owned a number of historical buildings in Lincoln. Joe later moved back to Midland/Odessa and resumed his career as a teacher. Great guy.
My lovely wife Ann and I are revisiting some spots in New Mexico next week where we honeymooned 25 years ago. So prior to our absence this week I am posting various scribblings from a sketchbook I kept while in Lincoln, NM in 1978. Here is my good old buddy, the late lamented Matt.
We went to “mado”, a BYOB restaurant in Wicker Park, Saturday night. The decor is nothing outstanding. I did like our tabletop alot…roughly textured boards with a nailed sheet metal strip down the center…the nails ground down smooth. “mado” does a great thing by purchasing from local farms within the natural “foodshed” as Joel Salatin dubs it. However, I was less than satisfied with my entree, a bowl of seafood stew…one-third of which was a chunk of bread…the stew was bland, amazing, considering that it was topped with a home-made green salsa. And it was $18! No sides or anything! Several of the other diners complained that their salads were salty. Whoever heard of a salty salad? Overall disappointing…the sketch above is of the man responsible, the chef and boss…he was wearing odd shoes with elven type tips which looked good on him.
This was a Tribune illustration…when it was published they cropped the left and right sides, thus the strange arcs.
A smattering of unfinished sketchbook drawings…the great cartoonist R. Crumb routinely depicts the modern technological clutter, such as power lines, which form such an ugly, inelegant background to our everyday life…objects which many of us probably barely notice because we are so used to it.
A woman of African ancestry, observed in a Tobago tavern.
Trinidad & Tobago has sizable population of ethnic Hindis, brought over by the British as laborers following the abolition of slavery.
Sandwiched around my sojourn to T&T, I visited with my friend Winkler. He was living his dream– or part of it, anyway: he had moved to Florida. Winkler was a character…13 years older than me, we worked together at the Glenrock Company when I was in college. He had been a cook in the navy during the ’50s and still used the same flapjack recipe, scaled down from thousands of servings to two or three.
Scary, huh?
Drawn on the train, reflected in the window, Easter 2009