Carole Jackson knows rehab. Armed with a degree in architecture and an MBA, the Oak Park resident has spent over 30 years in the business of rehabbing older residences throughout Chicago and its suburbs. 

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The latest spate of revelations regarding Catholic dioceses in Illinois protecting and hiding sexually abusive clergy is, sadly, nothing new.  

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On a Saturday morning earlier this month I was walking to the YMCA. On Saturdays The Y opens at 6 a.m. so I was timing my walk to get there when it opened. So around 5:55 a.m. I was heading north on Wisconsin just north of Madison. I was walking on the sidewalk on the west side of the street.

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Here's our short list of things that make locals sit up and howl: Propose a tall building. Change parking regulations and rates. Chlorinated water divided into lanes (in Oak Park and River Forest, at least). And, drumroll please, messing with foreign language instruction for children under 5 feet, 3 inches.

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Not a surprise, nor an outrage, that Oak Park, a town that was dry for a century and has expanded liquor sales only by the ounce over recent decades, would now require a license for Bring Your Own Bottle (BYOB) service in local spots that choose not to have a full liquor license.

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There should be a national day of mourning when our best and most loved poets die. But most of those poets probably wouldn't want that. Mary Oliver, who died on Jan. 17, was one of them. But she would probably approve of a national day of reading poetry in her honor, so let's make that day today.

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Why, after living in the village for over 40 years, do I have to repeatedly whistle-blow during parkway tree-pruning season? Because each time the lone elm in my parkway in the 900 block of Highland Avenue gets seriously and unnecessarily diminished by having harmless limbs lopped off at the trunk, as happened again on Jan. 15.

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Last week in Part I, I took issue with the board's tentative decision to fund parts two of Imagine OPRF's sequences entirely with existing cash, totally about $53 million. No one ever does that — it leaves the generation that will benefit from these new facilities entirely off the hook from paying for any of what they will use.

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A few weeks ago I glanced up at the new building looming on the corner of Harlem and South Boulevard. I gasped. Suddenly it was no longer in bits and pieces and different colors. It was finished. 

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On Jan. 17, I attended an excellent presentation in the Julian Middle School auditorium co-sponsored by SAY (Success of All Youth) and Wednesday Journal. It was the second in a series of Community Conversations designed to continue discussion concerning equity and the need of our villages to address this more effectively. 

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