Elgin strikes again

I suppose I should learn to keep my mouth shut. (Fat chance of that, you say.)

One of the things that attracted us to our home when we moved to Elgin in 1988 was the beautiful Zen garden on the east side of the property. It was just a patch of gravel to some, but to us it was a place for silent reflection before we got in the car in the morning and headed off to work.

Here's a picture of a Zen garden in Japan, just so you know. One man's parking apron is another man's garden.

Many a visitor was able to use my garden as a place to pray for safety as they turned their car around before venturing out into traffic on the four lane highway at the end of my driveway. Route 58 can be a challenge, especially when the cars are coming at you at 45 miles an hour. My timid friends always turned around in the gravel garden so they were at least entering headlights first on to 58.

But alas, someone (with the purest of motives, I'm sure) called the city to complain and the inspector came out to determine that I had unpaved parking. (I’m not sure how he could tell under all the snow and ice but he said it was gravel, and gravel is not permitted for an apron next to the driveway even if it was that way when I bought the house in 1988.)

Elgin cannot make room for this Asian diversity. They are stifling my religious expression by making me take out this gravel meditation garden. They must have a problem with this brand of multiculturalism. And Elgin doesn’t have an Asian Outreach Worker on the payroll.

But I try to obey the law. When the weather breaks I will get rid of the gravel and plant grass. But I will also be more careful to notice other problems in town. Like the lights at the ball field …or the noise from the PA system…or the height of the fence… or interference from the cell tower…or the lack of city maintenance clearing the sidewalk next to the baseball field…or when they dig up the sod when they do plow the walk…or when the city lawnmower cuts the sod off the right-of-way…or when they don’t trim the weeds around the poles…or the fact that they dug up my sidewalk and didn’t replace it yet…or the street light that has been dark on my street for months (that would be a State question, I will be told)…or the damaged utility pole at Preston and Summit that was mended but not replaced last year…or people drinking in the park…or the noisy cars…or the noisy dogs…or the loud music…or cars speeding down Summit Street……

Like for instance, every day I drive up Hiawatha and notice seven cars parked out in front of the duplex on the corner of Hiawatha and Jefferson. Today, one of the cars was parked sideways on the sidewalk because of the snow parking ban. Otherwise, every night there are three cars parked on the street. And that duplex isn’t that big.

I hesitate to call it in because I’ve reported a guy in my neighborhood parking on his patio with one car and parking the other on patio stones set in the grass on his lawn. Three times I told them about it. Nothing has changed.

The city has made it clear; they don’t like my kind of people around here. If only I can get a job somewhere else and sell my house, our four-bedroom place will become home to a family and their four “cousins” and their families. That will be much better for Elgin, don’t you think?

Maybe the city will buy it for a halfway house and put me out of my misery. (For you literalists out there, it is not really a Zen garden.)