Five little guys named blog.

NO MORE BLOGS UNTIL FRIDAY. I will be in Indianapolis, and I don’t have a laptop.

Another temperate day in Chicagoland. So warm, in fact, that I didn’t need a coat or sweater going out in the morning, for the first time in about a half-turn around the Sun. The bulbs planted on the southern side of our house are pushing through, too. A certain sign of spring. But the forces of Winter are marshaling for a rearguard action.

“Chicagoland?” Non-natives may wonder at the term. But it’s real. It refers to Chicago and its many, many suburbs: greater Chicago or metro Chicago, which you also hear sometimes. Fifteen years after first hearing the term, it still sounds a little odd to me. It’s the only metropolitan terminology I know that makes its area sound like an amusement park.

My regular doc had a look at the foot this morning. He thumped the cast like a watermelon and said, hmm. Well, not really, but essentially that was it. No x-rays today (which I wouldn’t have done anyway, since I needed to get to the office). In two weeks there may be some x-rays, to see how the bone is mending.

I’ve been passing through Indianapolis for years — ever since I did my first Nashville-to-Chicago run way back in ’82. I’ve even stopped in a few times. Business has taken me there often, and as usual I manage to shoehorn in some sightseeing on such occasions.

Back when I worked for “Fire Chief” magazine, I went to a fire chiefs’ convention there. Some of it was under the Hoosier Dome (now the Three Initial Corporation Dome). Those shows were always fun — plenty of fire trucks and other gizmos to see — but it had the added charm of being under this dome. The top of the dome isn’t a fixed piece of construction, but more like a vast white parachute, held up because the interior has a slightly higher air pressure. You enter the dome through enormous revolving doors. But there were more ordinary doors for the handicapped, and when they open you can feel the air blow outward.

In 1999, I visited Indianapolis’ Crown Hill Cemetery on a business trip, after I’d done my work. It’s an enormous old-style cemetery, plenty of trees and headstones and even a few hills. President (Benjamin) Harrison is buried there, so I went to see his stone, but it was a fairly drab affair, an undistinguished family stone surrounded by artless individual stones.

Nearby, Vice President Hendricks (Cleveland’s first, who died in office in 1885) has a better one, and best off all was Gov. Oliver Morton, the “War Governor” of Indiana (1861-67), who has a spiffy bust of himself atop his monument. By golly, he wanted people to remember him. Of course, almost no one has.

Yuriko thinks it odd, that I enjoy visiting cemeteries.

Then there was last year’s trip, in late March. The destination then was Columbus, Indiana, but we passed through Indy — right through the center of town, in rain that had grown stronger and stronger as we headed south that Friday morning. By the time we got to Benjamin Harrison’s house (him again) in mid-afternoon, it was pouring so hard that we waited in the car for a few minutes for it to slack off, rather than take the dash to the porch and main entrance of that structure. Just off a main north-south street and within sight of I-65 and the city’s downtown, the Harrison home proved to be a nicely appointed Victorian dwelling.

We were the only ones taking the tour, with a young guide that knew the house reasonably well, but not a lot about President Harrison. I thought about the contrast with my guide at Rutherford B. Hayes home in Sandusky, Ohio, who occasionally spoke as if “the General” — his preferred form of address, even after the presidency — were still out and about. Also, Hayes’ guide said that she was working her way through his collected letters. As for Harrison’s guide, she had not heard the (maybe apocryphal) story of Harrison not looking to see which statehood bill he signed first, when he signed both North and South Dakota into the Union at the same sitting.

We satisfied our need for a late lunch that day at a place called Mug-n-Bun, a drive-in the west side of the city. I’m old enough to remember such establishments in Texas, but I hadn’t been to one in many years, and Yuriko had never been to one at all. Along with an authentic atmosphere (as opposed to contrived retro), the hamburgers and such were very good.

More on Friday.