Original Grizzly?

 Picking the name might be my least favorite part of starting a new blog.  Whatever it is I wanted so badly to say to the world gets shelved and everything just screeches to a halt.

Hello, world!  I'm starting this blog to document (and share?) what I know and what I'm learning about my hometown of Forest Park, IL.  If you're unfamiliar (how did you get here?), it's a suburb of Chicago, just a mile-and-a-half straight west along 290.  It's also, somehow, a village.  The Village of Forest Park.  Calling it that always hit my ears a little odd, because my brain's default image of a "village" is the same as the first definition Google coughs up, from Oxford Languages: 

vil-lage

noun

a group of houses and associated buildings, larger than a hamlet and smaller than a town, situated in a rural area.

Exactly that, especially the rural part.  A village is a place you end up after walking a path through a forest for hours.  It has a handful of villagers, a blacksmith, and a tavern, and when you pop out the other end of it you're back in the woods.  Good luck!

Forest Park screws up being a village, by that definition, in every regard.  First, it is the furthest thing from rural.  It is abutted on almost every side by other alleged "villages", and you can cross from one into another by crossing a street and not notice the transition.  Second, way too big with way too many villagers, and thus way too many taverns.  Third, no blacksmith.  At least... there wasn't one when I lived there.  It's gotten more hipster-ish since I left, so I actually shouldn't assume anything, but I think the point stands that Forest Park does not historically have a blacksmith.

I must move on, so I'll acknowledge that there are other definitions of "village" that are applicable, and probably even interesting, just not very funny.  

So why "Original Grizzly"?

Because I attended Garfield Elementary School from 1985 to 1990, and I helped vote in "Garfield Grizzlies" as our mascot, which is still the Garfield mascot today.  I don't remember which year it was exactly, and I cannot even begin to recall what the other mascots were under consideration, but I remember that I voted Grizzlies.  You're welcome!