I just got home from Looptopia. There so many people downtown and in Grant Park late at night. I really enjoyed roaming around just people watching.A

ctually, the whole trip was rather unexpected. I went out with my Spanish class for a few drinks to celebrate a student’s birthday and some graduations. We were really enjoying drinking and chatting at the bar. Then, someone said we should go to Rush Street and then Looptopia. And we were off.

Every now and then, some of my students insist that we go out together for drinks. I always try to say no, but I always give in after some minor arm twisting. But I had a lot of fun with my students just wandering around Rush Street and the Loop and attracting the attention of everyone.

This is what my friends and I used to do when we were younger. Now, I find myself doing the same thing with my students. My students are a bad influence on me. And I liked it. I liked all the attention. My students kept telling me that they thought I was cool for going out with them. They repeated it so much that after a while I started to believe it myself.

As we wandered around, I met some people whom I knew, and my students were impressed by that. My sons mentioned it to me before. Whenever we go out, I usually greet someone I know. That’s just my world of coincidences. They don’t even phase me anymore. I’ve had so many unusual things happen to me in my lifetime that I just accept them as they come. Of course, if I were writing a book, I wouldn’t be able to include these wild coincidences because no one would believe them.

Mabenka Restaurant, 7844 S. Cicero Avenue, Burbank, Illinois 60459, 708.423.7679, serves Lithuanian and Polish cuisine. The owners named the restaurant using the letters of their children’s names. I’ve been eating there occasionally since it opened. I love their delicious food and the low prices. And the waitresses are always friendly. The only negative thing I can say about Mabenka is that it’s not in Chicago where it really belongs. It’s across the street from Chicago, so that’s close enough in my books to count as a Chicago restaurant.

 I ate supper there tonight because I couldn’t think of a topic for my blog. As I was sitting at my computer, I thought to myself, how can I write when I feel so hungry? So, I went to Mabenka’s for the first time in about a year.

I went by myself, and I must admit that I really enjoyed the company. I ordered the liver and onions with dumplings, sauer kraut, and mushroom soup. I’m not sure why, but I love liver and onions! I think that’s why I’m still single. I haven’t met a girl who loves liver and onions as much as me. I have only known one other person who loved liver and onions as much as me. And that was my mother.

When I was little, she made liver and onions quite frequently. My brothers ate it without complaints until they got older. Then my mother got creative. She made the liver without the onions and told my brothers that we were eating tiburón (shark). So everytime we ate liver sans onions, my mother said we were eating tigre, león, cocodrilo, among other exotic meats.

One day, we were all eating our liver and my brothers were about halfway finished eating it. Then, I accidentally said, “Mom, this is really good liver!” They all said, “I hate liver!” and stopped eating immediately. My mother was really mad at me for that.

So, I ate my liver and onions remembering all those times that I ate it with my mother and brothers. But I couldn’t finish it all tonight because they served me two large pieces. So, I took the leftovers to go. I’ll eat them in a few days and relive all my liver and onions flashbacks all over again while I eat the re-heated leftovers. As I drove home, I wondered what I would write for my blog entry.

Arturo was another one of my Mexican classmates at Holy Cross School. He looked like your typical Mexican. He was short and stocky with black hair and brown eyes. And he spoke English with a Mexican accent.

There was no mistaking him for Lithuanian. He was very charismatic, so he always had many friends and even more girlfriends. More girlfriends by his calculations. Any girl who talked to him was his girlfriend. But a lot of girls did talk to him because they liked the way he talked.

In class, he usually knew the answer, but sometimes he mispronounced words like shoes. He would always “choes.”  He couldn’t make the “sh” sound to pronounce shoes correctly. He would make the “ch” sound instead.

So, words like “church” and “choose” should have been easy for him, but they caused him just as much trouble. I explained to him that all he had to do was reverse the sounds of ch and sh. I helped him practice, but he never got the hang of it. On Sunday, Arturo went to “shursh” because he would “shoose” to go.

I once went with him to buy some shoes and he narrowed his selection to two pairs of shoes. For some strange reason, he thought I had excellent taste in choes, I mean shoes, so he asked me to help him buy some choes.

Anyway, he holds out the two pairs of shoes for me to inspect and says, “Whish choes chould I shoose?” I said, “Choose? Which shoes?” He said, “Yeah, whish choes?” I was getting frustrated by our interchange because I usually had this kind of conversation with my father. Not about choosing shoes, but about how to pronounce words in English. My father had trouble pronouncing the word “world.” To this day, he can’t pronounce “world.”

There were too many sounds in one word for my father. Arturo’s only problem was differentiating between two sounds: sh and ch. Now that I think of it, he couldn’t say chanclas, either. That typical Mexican word for flip-flops became shanclas.

My mother had super powers, but no one ever believed me. They weren’t super powers like comic book heroes have. Rather, they were more practical super powers that made my childhood extremely unbearable. For example, just by looking at a new friend that I brought home after school, my mother could tell if he would be a bad influence on me or not.

She could even predict if he would wind up in jail and in how many years. I never believed her analyses and I was sure she was completely wrong, but I couldn’t defend my new friends either. It was just easier not to bring them home anymore.

Somehow, she knew everything that I did. When I got tired of my paper route, I quit without telling anyone. I rode my bike home about two blocks away in about two minutes. As soon as I went into the house, my mother was standing by the door waiting for me with her arms crossed and she was glaring at me as I stood there silently. Then she asked, “Why did you quit your job?”

I never did find out how she knew I had quit, but somehow she knew! She could sense my every move no matter where I was. When I was little, I was only allowed to ride my bike around the block. By the time I was twelve, I was allowed to ride for about a two-block radius.

One day, as I was about to cross my mother’s imaginary line that I was forbidden to cross, I heard her yelling at me. How could she know where I was? Anyway, she yelled, “¡David! ¿A dónde vas?” I looked behind me so sure that I would see her there, but she wasn’t there! But I had heard her voice loud and clear.

She also had x-ray vision. Whenever someone sent me a card in the mail for my birthday or some other special occasion, not only did she know if there was money in the card, but she also knew exactly how much money was in the card. But the one thing we both knew for sure was that she would talk me out of my money. She would play on my sense of gratitude for her being my mother. She would remind me how she had raised me, provided me with a good education, and had also provided me with loving relatives who cared enough about me to send me money. She knew exactly what to say. I never kept any of my gift money.

My mother also knew that my first girlfriend would make a fine wife. She could tell just by looking at her. I pointed out to her that she was wrong when I got divorced. Of course, she didn’t believe it. Somehow, I was entirely responsible for the divorce and proving my mother wrong.