Can’t say I listened to him. (Hey, why start now?)

But I’m going to write about a warm summer week this week, for no other reason than I’ve been craving weather like this for months, and we’re almost there … just about in beer-and-barefoot-grilling territory, so close I can touch it.

This particular summer week has some small degree of retrospective family significance, as well.

July 27-30, 1970.

My grandfather’s job as a draftsman at Time Inc., his breadwinning gig for much of his adult life, ended in January 1970.

He then hooked on from April through September of that year with John McAdams and Sons, a small firm in nearby Norwalk, before work slowed down and they let him go.

He was jobless and looking until he had his first heart attack, in May 1971, at which point he retired.

So the week we’re looking at here — July 27-30, 1970 — might have been my grandfather’s last vacation as a working man.

A minor distinction, to be sure, but a distinction nonetheless. The promise of vacation helps make work tolerable, no matter what your job. And even a dutiful gent like my grandpa needed to put his feet up every now and again.

So what did he do with his time off? Barefoot grilling and beer?

Unfortunately, it seems like he had to spend some of it attending to chores — a doctor’s appointment for my great-grandma here, a service checkup on his car there.

And it may have been too brutally hot for him to really enjoy. (We’ve already established that he didn’t like humidity, and that he didn’t have air conditioning.)

I note that July 28 and 29 have pretty much nothing listed. While he probably spent some time doing routine household chores, like weeding the garden, I imagine he might have just grabbed a glass of cold lemonade and sat down in front of a floor fan for a while.

On July 30, he roused himself long enough to head down to the post office and stop his mail, in preparation for an out-of-town trip.

It’s interesting that he didn’t leave town a couple days earlier, even though there were no commitments on his calendar. Instead, he stayed in Stamford and baked in the stifling heat he disliked for a couple of days.

And then, escape was at hand for the traveling man.

But we’ll get back to that next week, I think.

I kind of enjoy looking at a blank page. I kind of enjoy looking at a full one, too.

But I love being somewhere in between — filling in the blanks, and taking the journey, and painting the picture, and having sideways diversions occur to me and having to decide whether to take them, and picking up a paragraph or two of text and moving them somewhere totally unexpected, and looking for just the right word to build a bridge from one thought to the next.

I’m not saying I do any of these things well by any means. But I enjoy doing them the way some people enjoy skiing down a fresh slope or skidding an MGB around a hairpin turn somewhere in the country.

A woman I follow on Twitter (she writes for Runner’s World magazine) recently used the term “pain cave” to refer to 5K footraces. It’s a pretty good analogy, and one that I’m sure applies to races of other lengths as well.

Once you’ve been running a few minutes, you enter a private zone dominated by thoughts of your own pain, tolerance and stamina, punctuated by occasional thoughts of the people in front of or behind you. You go into the cave and do battle with the bear for a while, whether you’re conscious of it or not.

Writing is kinda like that. You go into the cave, and lose sight of everything else, and see what you can put your hands on while you’re in there. And when it goes well, an hour or two go by without you noticing, and you’ve made something that no one else ever quite has before.

Even though it’s probably fiction, I’m going to assume that this week’s calendar finds my grandfather in his own version of that same headspace.

November 10, 1968.

I’ve mentioned here and there that my grandpa was an artist.

It’s probably a topic that deserves more space than I’ve ever given it, because he was pretty good at it. Painting served as his release valve in his corporate days, and his creative outlet in retirement.

The mention of “Canvas Sunday” makes me think of his medium of choice.

Of course, it makes me think of some sort of church activity as well. (Maybe Canvas Sunday is the day when you canvass everyone in the congregation for the money they didn’t give you on Loyalty Sunday.)

And a Google search for “Canvass Sunday” suggests that it is, by and large, a day when people go door to door to spread the word about their particular beliefs. (It seems to be more of a political term than a religious term.)

But my grandpa, a learned man with an eye for detail, didn’t write “Canvass Sunday.”  He wrote “Canvas Sunday.”

So I’m going to go ahead and interpret it to mean what I want it to mean.

And what I want it to mean is that my grandpa spent Sunday, Nov. 10, 1968, in the creativity cave … communing with a piece of canvas to the exclusion of the outside world, and coming away from his labors with something new and distinctive.

That’s probably wishful thinking. But I can wish, if I want.

I think he enjoyed going into the cave as much as I do, and he wouldn’t complain about the notion of spending time there. Time in the cave helps us creative types put up with everything else in life.

Unfortunately, mine seems to be just about over for this week.  I expect I will crave it, and think about it, and chew on it in the back of my mind, until the next time I can spring myself for another of my personal versions of Canvas Sunday.

See, I’ve got this blank canvas for next week …

Last year around this time, we dropped in on my grandparents in May 1969, as they marked their wedding anniversary with a splurgey meal in the upscale town of Westport.

This year we revisit them six years later to the day. They are still married, of course, and still committed to going out for their anniversary.

But some things have changed: My grandpa is retired now, and has a little less money to throw around. He’s probably watching what he eats a little bit more, too.

For this year’s celebration, they stay a little closer to home, choosing a Stamford institution for their big dinner:

May 3, 1975.

A little searching on the Internet, and the place starts coming alive:

The Stamford Advocate tells us the Chimney Corner did business for 41 years at Long Ridge and Webbs Hill roads, and was particularly popular among elderly diners for its early-bird specials.

This undated, unused postcard brings us inside the main dining room, decorated in an early American style.

This ’50s-era postcard shows us the distinctive slope of the building’s exterior, as well as a landmark depiction of a horse and sleigh that stood over the parking lot entrance until somebody knocked it over.

This matchbook tells me my grandparents would have called Davis 2-1264 to make a reservation. (Well, OK, not by 1975 they wouldn’t have.)

This sugar cube tells us … well, it doesn’t really lend any historical insight per se, but it’s sorta fun to imagine my grandma putting one in her coffee. (There was a time when sugar didn’t come from sealed paper envelopes, apparently.)

And this article from the New York Times (which may be trapped behind the Gray Lady’s paywall for non-subscribers) fills us in on what became of the place: Most of it was torn down in 1991 to make way for a shopping center. The corner of the building with the namesake chimney was retained, apparently as some sort of tie to the past.

This building is where the Chimney Corner was. It has three chimneys now, and I don’t think the one in the photo is the one they kept. (There’s space available, if anyone’s looking to sublet.) Photo courtesy Google Earth.

The one thing I can’t find online is a menu that would help me get a sense of what my grandparents would have sat down to on May 3, 1975. (I do find a past eBay listing of an old menu, but wouldn’t you know it, it’s closed. The menu. Not the auction. Well, yeah, both, actually.)

I note that the New York Times’ archives do not include any reviews of the Chimney Corner Inn — unlike the Westport restaurant where my grandparents ate in 1969, which received a NYT review a number of years later.

If the Chimney Corner Inn was around for 41 years and New York’s paper of record never went to the ‘burbs to check it out, its culinary reputation couldn’t have been too noteworthy.

I’m guessing the place was one of those stolid, upright, not-tremendously-creative locally owned restaurants every city has — the sort of place you go for high school graduations or anniversaries that don’t end in zero or five. I imagine they broiled a lot of prime rib, stuffed a lot of pork chops and baked a lot of potatoes over the course of 41 years.

There’s not necessarily anything wrong with that, of course, if that’s what you’re looking for.

It seems to have struck a chord with my grandparents: A little further research indicates they’d been there the year before.

May 2-4, 1974. Hey, Rod, you didn’t call.

I guess predictable and reliable are good things to be after 30-plus years of marriage — whether you’re talking about the marriage, or the place you go to celebrate it.

We’ll start with the bad news: This coming Monday’s post is boring and pedestrian and you probably won’t like it that much.

The good news: Hope Street has won an award from the local paper’s best-local-blog contest for the second straight year.

Last year, Hope Street won as best blog in the Family category. This year, readers (probably including a whole bunch of you) voted Hope Street best blog in the Personal category.

The full story can be found on the Morning Call’s website here. I haven’t brought myself to look at it because there are probably some really dorky-looking pictures of me somewhere in the package.

(For those of you who voted the full slate, my other blog, Neck Pickup, won Best Music Blog. I’d like to think that was in honor of my eight straight posts about the Bay City Rollers, but that series started after the contest ended. So it must have been something else.)

After having been to the awards ceremony, I have warmed to the idea of a blog contest, as opposed to being totally pissy about it, as I’ve been in the past.

It was a pleasure to spend some time tonight in the company of a bunch of other bloggers who are passionate and creative. And it was an honor (hopefully not too much of an ego stroke) to hear them say they like what I do here.

Even if I remain kind of ambivalent about the idea of a “best blog,” I appreciate the paper setting up the framework for that kind of interaction.

And I appreciate the time and effort that those of you who voted put into supporting me. Thank you for your support. I will endeavor to keep the blog worthy of your time and interest.

After this coming Monday, that is. Did I mention you might not wanna tune in?

The approximate location of 1107 Hope Street, spring 2013. Courtesy Google Earth.

This post was originally scheduled for April 15, more or less the second anniversary of Hope Street. But it seemed dreadfully slack to ask people to vote for me in a blog contest and then take a week off. So my week off will wait … until now.

I think I’m going to continue the tradition I established last year, and mark this blog’s anniversary by taking a week off.

Doesn’t seem like two years since I started doing this, but indeed it is.

It’s been an interesting 12 months here at Hope Street. See, I front-loaded the first year with the calendar entries that seemed to offer the easiest blog posts, as well as those that seemed to be the grabbiest for a non-family audience.

As time goes on, the calendar entries I have to work with tend to be more open-ended — which means the posts tend to be more about me, and more impressionistic, and more creative, as opposed to being recaps of some specific moment in family history.

Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn’t. (But look on the bright side: At least I haven’t written any more of my awful poetry lately.)

I’ve still got a bunch of calendar entries saved up. Some of ‘em will be more interesting than others, of course. But if you like it here, be assured we’ll keep doing this for a while yet.

I appreciate all those who follow the blog and read every week, or even some weeks. I’m not sure why you do it sometimes, but it’s nice of you.

The usual grovel is still in effect: If you like what you read, please consider sharing a link on Twitter, Facebook or any other social media in which you participate. Hope Street remains a strictly noncommercial thoroughfare; I’m only in it for the eyeballs.

Perhaps you will enjoy revisiting (or, if you’re new here, reading for the first time) what I consider my greatest hits from the past 12 months:

• Honoring the family black sheep.
• The shortest post I’ve ever written, and maybe the best.
• A look inside my grandfather’s heart.
• Something like 800 words on cesspools. Really.
• Now is the time on Hope Street when we dance!
• My grandpa pulls splinter duty.
• A tale of two New Yorks.
• An automotive love story.

I’ll be back with more next Monday (unless I get guilty about taking a week off and decide to post something else in midweek.)

Be good.