Never o'clock at the oasis
I came downstairs for breakfast Thursday morning and my father greeted me by saying, your mother got bad news this morning. Oh, dear, I thought--what could it be?
She learned the O'Hare Oasis is closing September 5th.
However, if you know my mom, this is a big deal. So I immediately texted her to say, I hear you got bad news; would you like a hug? She texted back, yes, so I sent the word "hug" and got back "thanks." Aw. Poor mom.
She's not a foodie in the regular sense, but she loves to eat. And the oasis is a place for her to do that. I'm not even sure how often she goes there, only that she's there at least once a week, often enough for some of the workers to recognize her. If she's running early to work, she'll stop by for her 82-cent senior coffee. If traffic or weather are bad, she'll stop there on the way home and hang out for a bit. Food and a bathroom--what more does she need?
Dad and I spent some time there, too, when we were cleaning out Papa's apartment. We wouldn't eat anything at the house, in part because by the time he'd died, the food had been cleared out or else you wouldn't have wanted to eat it; and we didn't really use the bathroom there, especially since for a while there wasn't a door or curtain on it. Dad could go to the oasis and get a coffee for the ride home, we'd maybe get a bite to eat; it was super convenient, because you didn't have to get entirely off the tollway in order to do that. Plus, being a tollway, sometimes you'd get charged to leave the roadway. That's likely the thinking behind having the oases in the first place.
It's going away because they're expanding the Tri-State, I-294, and short of doing away with the shoulders of the road, there's no way to have more lanes there without removing the building. Such a bummer. I saw somewhere online that the road is getting expanded by one lane in each direction all the way down to Oak Lawn. That may well be taking out the Hinsdale Oasis too, but the Southland Oasis, not far from Indiana, may still be there. Unsure; I haven't looked into it. I just know that this is the one I'm most familiar with, so I'm sad to see it go. Not as sad as mom, though.
The other thing from Thursday morning: I got in my car and saw what looked like a garbage truck coming down the other end of the street. I knew dad was just sitting on the couch with his guitar; he hadn't put out our trash yet. Uh, dad, you might want to do that... I'm so tired from working this week that I decided I wasn't going to get out of the car; I'd just call him to be like, uh, take out the trash... He was confused as to why I was calling from the driveway, but he did apparently do the task. Eventually, he'd tell me that it wasn't one of the trash trucks; instead, it was for yard waste. I couldn't tell that from my angle, but he's supposed to have the trash out before 8 AM anyway--it was about 8:15 at the time--so yeah, it needed to get done regardless.
She learned the O'Hare Oasis is closing September 5th.
However, if you know my mom, this is a big deal. So I immediately texted her to say, I hear you got bad news; would you like a hug? She texted back, yes, so I sent the word "hug" and got back "thanks." Aw. Poor mom.
She's not a foodie in the regular sense, but she loves to eat. And the oasis is a place for her to do that. I'm not even sure how often she goes there, only that she's there at least once a week, often enough for some of the workers to recognize her. If she's running early to work, she'll stop by for her 82-cent senior coffee. If traffic or weather are bad, she'll stop there on the way home and hang out for a bit. Food and a bathroom--what more does she need?
Dad and I spent some time there, too, when we were cleaning out Papa's apartment. We wouldn't eat anything at the house, in part because by the time he'd died, the food had been cleared out or else you wouldn't have wanted to eat it; and we didn't really use the bathroom there, especially since for a while there wasn't a door or curtain on it. Dad could go to the oasis and get a coffee for the ride home, we'd maybe get a bite to eat; it was super convenient, because you didn't have to get entirely off the tollway in order to do that. Plus, being a tollway, sometimes you'd get charged to leave the roadway. That's likely the thinking behind having the oases in the first place.
It's going away because they're expanding the Tri-State, I-294, and short of doing away with the shoulders of the road, there's no way to have more lanes there without removing the building. Such a bummer. I saw somewhere online that the road is getting expanded by one lane in each direction all the way down to Oak Lawn. That may well be taking out the Hinsdale Oasis too, but the Southland Oasis, not far from Indiana, may still be there. Unsure; I haven't looked into it. I just know that this is the one I'm most familiar with, so I'm sad to see it go. Not as sad as mom, though.
The other thing from Thursday morning: I got in my car and saw what looked like a garbage truck coming down the other end of the street. I knew dad was just sitting on the couch with his guitar; he hadn't put out our trash yet. Uh, dad, you might want to do that... I'm so tired from working this week that I decided I wasn't going to get out of the car; I'd just call him to be like, uh, take out the trash... He was confused as to why I was calling from the driveway, but he did apparently do the task. Eventually, he'd tell me that it wasn't one of the trash trucks; instead, it was for yard waste. I couldn't tell that from my angle, but he's supposed to have the trash out before 8 AM anyway--it was about 8:15 at the time--so yeah, it needed to get done regardless.