A Post Card from Galena

My husband and I just returned home from an extended weekend in Galena, Illinois to celebrate our anniversary and a birthday with a zero in it. We have usually taken a trip abroad when either of us has a decade birthday, but COVID-19 kept us downsizing our plans again and again this year.

At least we hadn't continued planning, as we had been at one point, on driving down to central Florida. Last week's record-breaking mild weather in the Midwest was far and away better than what Hurricane Eta was affording Floridians.

Galena is a peculiar little town folded in among gullies and ravines on the steep valley walls of the Galena River, which used to be called Fever River, but 19th Century civic leaders decided that its name wasn't a particularly effective selling point for the place. It's the hometown of General and President Ulysses S. Grant, so you can visit his home, and a museum where there is a painting by Thomas Nast of General Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox. 

You can also browse a Main Street crowded with shops selling all manner of bric-a-brac. I found a used book of editorial cartoons by Frank Miller, culled from his entire career's output by his Des Moines Register editors after he died in 1983. I look forward to reading it.

Galena, population somewhere around 3,500, seems to have escaped the attentions of U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. It has two post offices, the same number that remain within the city limits of the burg of 78,000 where I was raised. We also came across those blue mailboxes in several places around Galena; where I live, you can only find those boxes at the Post Office.

This post comes as a way of explaining, or perhaps excusing, tomorrow's cartoon.

The birthday of my better half comes early in November, which coincides with regularly scheduled elections. For a political cartoonist, taking vacations in early November is like a tax attorney closing shop for the first half of April. But we do it anyway.

As we were about to leave for Puerto Vallarta in November, 2000, I proposed to my editor that I leave him two cartoons: one for use if George W. Bush won the election, and another for use if Al Gore won. He told me to come up with something else, and it's a good thing he did. That election had still not been decided by the time we returned home.

Tomorrow's cartoon was drawn after this year's ballots had been cast, but while only Donald Tommy Flanagan Trump was projecting any winner. I kept to my former editor's advice, and drew a cartoon that would reflect my views, whether the election would have been won by Trump, Joe Biden, or a player to be named later.

Anywho, it's good to be home again, to our own bed, to our own kitchen, and to a television that isn't programmed to tune in to Fox News every time we turn it on.