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| Lake Bluff's Village Green Gazebo |
If what makes the news is any measure of the civility of a given town, then no one can dispute that the Lake Forest/Lake Bluff enclave is a damned civil place.
The Gazebo News, that area's spritely hyperlocal on-line publication carried the following news story last month:
Young Cat Found In Lake Bluff
A Lake Bluff resident wants to report that he found a young, male, black; grey, white-chested tabby who is a very sweet animal.
“The cat wandered into (or was dropped-off in) our neighborhood on Sylvan Road and hung around. We figured if he hadn’t gone home by nightfall he was lost or abandoned,” said Steve, who found the cat. “Based on his over-all appearance (he’s a little round at the girth) we think he’s a well-loved animal from somewhere nearby.”
Please call 847/295-XXXX if you know where this cat belongs!
Contrast this to Chicago proper, where violence has become so commonplace, that even the almost-daily street shootings now go unreported.
And the profusion of stray companion animals in the city overwhelms those few kindly souls who try their best to provide some bit of solace to them.
Take, for example, the ladies of Hyde Park Cats and West Rogers Park Cats.
A group of women in the University of Chicago and the Chicago/Evanston border areas, respectively, have gone to extraordinary lengths to try and rescue as many of the legions of abandoned animals as possible.
But so profuse are the abandoned city cats,dogs and their offspring that these efforts seem like those of Sisyphus, doomed to eternally rolling his stone up the hill.
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| Hyde Park Cats Volunteer with recently rescued kitty |
(Please check out their blogs and help them out a bit if you can.)
But in Lake Forest/Lake Bluff a missing cat is big news.
And as one who's spent a lot of time in the Lake Forest/Lake Bluff corridor for social and political reasons, I can attest to the fact that it is hardly suffering much from what Dr. Milt Rosenberg has termed, "the coarsening of the culture."
People actually smile at you and say hello on the Green Bay bike trail up there -- and a lost kitty becomes big news.
It's a damned civil place.
We lived in Lake Bluff for a year. I have to say, it's a doggone great neighborhood to take your kids trick-or-treating to! They even had free hot dogs!
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