Crazy Crap Item #235: The part where I tend to a long overdue memorial

I told myself I wouldn't let a year pass before I tended to this, but here it is, a year later, and I've yet to post.

What I'm referring to is a sad event that transpired one year ago today: The passing of Dolores McDermott.

Please don't misconstrue the long delay. It's not that Dolores' death passed unnoticed, or that her absence wasn't mourned. It's just that tributes are always hard to write, and particularly so when the person you're memorializing took on mythic status. That's the case here.

In a way, this entire blog serves as Dolores' memorial. What else can be said about someone who appeared so often in these pages?

But it's not just a matter of frequency. Any account of 1500 Norwood would be incomplete without the tales of Dolores. She was a fixture, an icon. "The lady in the lawnchair," the first harbinger of spring whose habitual appearance seated in the folding chair in her driveway signaled that the fine weather was finally here.

She was the "mayor of Norwood," constantly observing, always with a bit of news about this neighbor or that. Passersby would stop to say hello; sometimes cars would even stop. Anyone who doubts the ominpresence of Dolores need only visit Google maps, and take a street view of our block. Dolores sits there to this day in her lawnchair, enshrined in Internet glory.

It's only on a block like 1500 Norwood that you'd have a Dolores -- the sometimes sweet, sometimes crotchety old lady who knows everyone and everything that's happened in the last 40 years on this block. What's more, she assumes you know them as well -- "You know, Bill on Glenview. He was the one who lived in the blue house when the dime store caught fire..."

I don't even know how long Dolores had lived on Norwood, but it was a long time. I estimate it must've been at least 100 years. In my mind's eye, I see her in a 1930s housedress, Marcel waves in place, calling in the kids to listen to "Little Orphan Annie" on an enormous wood-paneled radio. That's all wrong, of course; Dolores would barely be a baby in the early '30s. But there was something so undeniably old-tyme about Dolores, so Depression-era, so much of deep roots and cherished traditions, the image feels right. She was like a throwback, an icon of old-ladyness from another time--not unlike her block, a throwback to the old-fashioned Chicago neighborhood.

In fact, I'd say it's not simply that you cannot describe 1500 Norwood without mentioning Dolores. I'd suggest she herself was a sort of emblem for everything that's special about this block. She embodied the permanence of a neighborhood where people don't move away, and where old ladies stay in houses that are too big for them long after many would retire to the nursing home. She was a living example of the shared memories, the traditions, that makes community on such a block coherent.

She wasn't just sweetness and light, some latterday Aunt Bea. She was Chicago life, warts and all. She got crabby and complained about her relatives to anyone who would listen. She spied. She harbored a long-time feud with our other neighborhood stalwart, Bernadine.

But she also held up the pillars of community by keeping tabs on all our neighborhood doings. It was she, long-term readers may recall, who revealed who stole my Autumnal pumpkins, and who pooped on my lawn.

There was a certain shamelessness to Dolores that was the hallmark of old-ladyness, the privilege of living into your 80s. She never hid the fact she spied on you; she blithely proclaimed she had watched you doing thus and such. Often, she skipped a greeting altogether, and launched into her latest complaint instead--the fact that her grandkids hadn't washed the dishes or that someone had looked at her squinty-eyed--followed by an exasperated rolling of the eyes.

But her shamelessness was coupled with an oddly circumlocutionary way of addressing matters. She was paradoxically direct and indirect at the same time, skipping the niceties of normal human discourse. I fondly recall the time I came home, and as I pulled up to the curb, she beelined straight for me, waddling into the street on her characteristic blue Crocs. "I'm going to a wedding Saturday, and I need a dress. I wanted Ray to take me to the store, but he's not home. He said he would but he's not there..." To know Dolores was to realize that what she was really saying was, "I want to go dress shopping, I want to go now, and you're going to take me." Who was I to disagree?

But she was also generous. Nothing gave her more joy than discovering she had something she could give you. One time, she complained of a deli-quality meat slicer that was taking of space in her pantry. "Does your husband like meat?" Soon, we had a meat slicer. And bags of tupperware. And a tub of frozen cookie dough.

In the few years I knew Dolores, I got small glimpses of her life before old age. Once she told me of how she loved to sing when she was a little girl. She laughed at herself, showing me how she'd sit tipped back in a chair in her backyard, crooning to the moon.

Another time, she told me about how she'd take her many (8? 9?) kids to the dime store, which was at that time located about a few blocks north of us on Clark. She described leading them down the street, and how they'd have to stop and inspect each and every gangway. The trip would take hours, she recalled.

But these were only snapshots, and after she passed, I was delighted and surprised to get a fuller image of Dolores from the remembrances of her children at her wake and her funeral. Dolores loved to dance. She was committed to family traditions, particularly at the holidays. She raised her children with love, joy and energy.

Finally, it must be recalled that it is thanks to Dolores that Eamon and I ever came to Norwood. After viewing our house, we loved our house so much we decided to go all in. We made an offer of the highest amount we could pay, knowing it was still under the asking price. Our offer was politely declined. Later, mysteriously, it was accepted. Dolores later gave her version of the story. She'd met Eamon when he came back to see the house, and took an immediate liking to him. When she heard that our offer had been declined, she told the owners--the O'Malley kids who had lived across the street from her nearly all their lives--that we were nice people and they had to sell to us. We were the sort that needed to live here. The rest, as they say, is blog history.

So that's Dolores, our Lady of the Lawnchair, Mayor of Norwood. As a final farewell, let us pause to recall her legacy:

Crazy Crap Item #6: The part where my pumpkins go missing

Crazy Crap Item #61: The part where I see the first robin of spring, Norwood Street style

Crazy Crap Item #94: The part where we light the torch on the summer block party tradition

Crazy Crap Item #111: The part where I experience the joy of city living

Crazy Crap Item #115: The part where I document the first robin of spring

Crazy Crap Item #136: The part where Delores experiences an upgrade