It’s time for that annual looking back at the past year and reminiscing. I am going back even farther. I have been encouraged to go back farther because apparently Millenials and younger people have been disparaging my generation, Baby Boomers. They are blaming us for leaving them a world in terrible shape.  Some of that is justified, but my generation is responsible for a lot of good things too!

Yesterday I watched CBS Sunday Morning. They did their annual look back at noteworthy people who left our world in 2019.  Diahann Carrol was pictured. She was famous because she was the first female black star of a TV series.  Yes, really.  Hard to believe, right? But there were so many changes in the ’60s. Think back to before that.

Lucy and Desi slept in twin beds! So did Rob and Laura Petrie.  Bridget Loves Bernie was a groundbreaking TV comedy about a Jewish man and a Catholic girl getting married. Oh, the horror!  How about the controversy about the sound of a flushing toilet in All in the Family? I am pretty sure people have been pooping for generations.  There was much ado about Mary Tyler Moore (as Mary Richards) sleeping overnight at her boyfriend’s house. Mary was a successful professional woman. Why shouldn’t she?

When I started elementary school, we were forced to read the Bible every day, out loud to the rest of the class.  The girls in high school business classes were taught to tie ties for their future male bosses.  At the same time, girls were forced to wear skirts or dresses, even in the dead of winter. In the South, when I was a child, black people had to drink from different fountains and sit in different sections of movie theaters and, most famously, at the back of the bus. Now we have had a black president!  Being homosexual, back then, was something to be hidden and ashamed of. Today, homosexuals can legally marry.

My generation, I believe, started all of these changes. It was the boomers who challenged the status quo. It was us who said we don’t have to do it the way it has always been done.  We changed music. We changed fashion. Hey, we even stopped a war!

Were we perfect? Of course not. Have things that we started gone too far? Maybe. Personally, I don’t like the coarseness of society today. It’s one thing to have the freedom to throw around f-bombs in public. The consequence is that families with small children have to hear it all around them. The Lehigh Valley Mall on a Friday night!

So there you have it! As The Who said “Talkin’ Bout My Generation!”  So the next time I hear someone condescendingly say “Ok, Boomer”, I will just smile to myself and think yes…we are OK!

 

 

 

 

Remember Gumby?  That always smiling, always green, and always handless and footless character from many of our childhoods? What word do you think of when you think of Gumby?  I think of flexible.  He could bend backward and forward! He could bend east and west! He could bend north and south!  He could bend in half!  Flexible!!

You know who is 100% Gumby? Little children, Olympic gymnasts, high school wrestlers, and Scarlett Johannson (I’m guessing there, but she is my Hollywood crush). You know who is 0% Gumby?  That would be me!

Of all the things I dislike about growing older, I think number one is my lessening flexibility.  Oh sure, I don’t care for the increasing amount of wattle under my chin. Of course, I am not fond of never getting a full night’s sleep.  And, the increasing amount of technology is not my favorite either.  But that lack of being Gumby bendable really frustrates me.

When I babysit my grandson and he wants to play a board game, I think to myself let it please fit on the table!  When I sit with a client for an hour and have to get out of my chair…just give me a second!  Or worst of all, dropping something and having to pick it up from the floor. Almost daily, I go to throw something in the trash and miss and have to pick it up. Damn!

It’s not that I am unhealthy. I hike and run and kayak. But getting up off the floor to me is almost like climbing Everest. When did that become a part of my life?

I’m not sure what the fix is. Maybe yoga to improve my flexibility?  Maybe essential oils? Instead, maybe I will just watch some old Gumby episodes and dream of days gone by.

 

It is four days before Christmas. Today is winter’s solstice, the first day of winter. I bet you think this post will be about one of those. No, sir or madam. I am taking us back to May of 1976! I was about to turn 24 and I was about to meet a woman I would share 24 years of my life with. But first, some background.

Does anyone remember AMC, American Motors Corporation?  I forget when they went bankrupt, but I owned an AMC Gremlin in 1976.  The Gremlin was much derided in its time but I understand that it is now a favorite of collectors. I liked my Gremlin, aqua marine in color, and easy to drive. It was a wonderful car, except for its windshield wipers! More on that later.

So I get to know Janice in a Business Math class at LCCC. We got along really well and our sense of humor was a perfect match.  It turns out that she was two years behind me at good old Slatington High School, but we didn’t run in the same circles. By the end of the semester I gathered the courage to ask her out. The date was arranged and I was supposed to pick her up in my AMC Gremlin. Uh oh.

Remember, it was a fine car except for those windshield wipers. The thing is…the wipers would go up…but stay up! I had to reach out the window and give them a little shove so they would go down again. Of course, they would come right back up, but stay there,again, until I reached out the window and shove them again!

So the morning of our first date I check the weather forecast. 80% chance of rain this evening, the evening of the date.  Nooooo. How embarrassing this may be!? I am to pick her up at 6 PM. Still no rain. So far so good. I leave my house at 5:45, still no rain. I make my way up Main Street saying to myself “Please don’t rain. Please don’t rain!”.  Guess what. Ten minutes after I pick her up, it starts to rain. Actually, it starts to pour!  I do what I have to do with the wipers, explaining why I am doing this at the same time.  She found it hilarious and we laughed and laughed. She even helped me wring the rainwater from my sleeve before we went into the movie theater.

I’m not sure why I am remembering this on winter’s solstice. I do remember telling a client on Wednesday night that 95% of the things we worry about never happen anyway.  I guess this little tale proves that sometimes they do.  And even, then, you can just make the best of it.

Happy winter’s solstice everyone. Each day, after today, the sun is out a little longer. Spring is on the way!

 

This is my Christmas tree for 2019. It’s the second year in a row that I’ve gone with a table top tree.  Not quite a Charlie Brown tree…its branches are full and it’s a verdant green.  But small nonetheless.  It seems to fit my lifestyle and remember I am a Buddhist. Buddhists usually don’t celebrate Christmas, but…I do like me some presents!

After I spent a long 5 minutes decorating my tree (note the Beatles ornaments and yes, I am #1 Grandpa!), I began to reminisce about Christmas trees past.

When I was a child, I remember going with my dad to get a tree. My mom never came along. This was the days before cut your own tree farms. My dad and I would drive to a tiny Shell station on North Walnut Street and get a tree from a small collection of cut trees. To me it was always perfect. It was fun to decorate. I can remember having lights that were tubes of bubbling liquid. I can remember us having a giant dark blue Christmas ball. It was the size of a grapefruit ( the size of grapefruits in the ’60s, not those orange sized yellow balls of today).  It had to be hung on the lowest branch because it was so heavy. It was, I was told, passed down through generations. I wonder where it might be today.

In my junior high days, artificial trees became popular. We actually had an all silver tree and, of course, the rotating color wheel to go along with it.  It was green, then blue, then red, then yellow, then green again. Fascinating….for about three minutes!  My mom loved that tree. I think she really appreciated the lack of muss and fuss.

When I was an adult, with kids of my own, we usually opted for hiking through a tree farm and cutting a tree down with the farm provided saw. It’s funny how it always was bigger when you got it home than it looked in the field. Optical illusion I guess.

So the fact that I am down to a table top tree does not mean that I am some kind of Grinch. Emma is seventeen now and she spends less time here and more time with her friends. She doesn’t care about the small tree nor the lack of a big one. She did help me put other decorations throughout my place. There is a plump, gingerbread woman in my bathroom!  It makes me feel a little bashful when I pee!

Enjoy your tree, whatever size it is. Enjoy your tree whether it is real or fake. Enjoy your tree if it sits on the floor or up on a table. Remember, the tree is only a symbol of Christmas love.  Make sure that your Christmas love is huge and real and is big enough to fill the whole world!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last night I attended Parkland High School’s Winter Choral Concert. My daughter, Emma, was one of the fantastic altos! The concert was wonderful. There were, literally, 300 voices. As always, Parkland High School encourages its students to explore new things, challenge the expected, and flex their abilities.  The school may be a bit too class conscious, but it does put on a good show and the professionals appear to be very dedicated.

So, I was expecting the usual winter holiday concert, hearing things like Let It Snow, Baby It’s Cold Outside (okay, maybe not that!), and Silent Night. Only the last half hour of the two hour show was devoted to the typical Christmas fare. The first hour and a half was filled with songs I did not recognize. There were songs from many religions and many ethnicities, almost a United Nations of song.  At one point, the choral director unexpectedly walked off the stage and into the hall. I thought to myself that this guy really has to pee!  He walked back in with a group of a dozen students in tuxedos and gowns. They sang two beautiful songs. One of the songs was called My Companion. It was so beautiful that I want to try to find it on Spotify.

The concert was amazing! I’ve written before about how I get emotional when I see these high school students performing. It happened again last night. Three hundred students with lives to live. Such potential, yet we know that not all of their lives will be wonderful.  Which of them will divorce? Which of them will lose a child or a spouse?  Which ones won’t see thirty?  That sounded a little Debbie Downerish! I also thought about which ones will have successful careers and wonderful families and…will that animated redhead in the back row grow up to be president?

I guess what I am saying is all of these teens have lives to live that will be filled with good and some bad.  I wish I had the power to remove some obstacles to their potential good life.  I wish I could do something to take any pain away from these kids and have them always feel the way they felt last night…confident and optimistic and happy.

You know what else I wish? I wish I was seventeen.

 

When I was in junior high (middle school for you young folk), I spent a lot of time on my own exploring the quarries, slate dumps (huge, mountain-like piles of waste slate), woods, and fields of Slatington’s western border.  I always enjoyed my alone time. I still do.  There was no better place nor time than this area, especially after a snowfall. So quiet and still with beautiful views and no one around for miles.

Let me take you on a little walk. Those of you from Slatington may remember these places. I hope those who grew up elsewhere will indulge my reminiscence. I will try to paint a picture so you will understand why this place was so special to me.

I lived on Dowell Street. From my backyard you could see the slate dumps. After a snowfall they looked like huge servings of Cookies and Cream Ice Cream!  It was just a short walk to a steep path that took you down to Trout Creek. You had to cross the creek to get to the quarries and woods and fields.  I crossed at the train trestle, being careful not to slip on the snow. I don’t think I would have fit through the space between ties, but I didn’t want to get stuck in there either.  At the very end of the trestle there was another path that led through some trees, uphill to my destination.  It is steep, it is slippery, but I know this like the back of my hand.

At the top of this path is a small test quarry, maybe eight feet across and incredibly deep. I think these, there were several in the area, are the main reason our parents didn’t want us up there. But step around this quarry and take a few steps forward and I come to the most beautiful view in the area. To the left is the very large and very deep and very turquoise blue Pennsylvania quarry.  It is like a small lake. The color seems out of place and it it enhanced by the whiteness of the snow. Wow! To my right is a deep green quarry, maybe half the size of the Pennsylvania, with steep cliff walls that were filled with pigeons and scattered ledges of snow. I can’t remember the name of this quarry, but all of the quarries had names.

Between the two quarries, turquoise on the left and Kelly green on my right was a land bridge, maybe four feet across, that led to the other side.  This land bridge was, over time falling into the quarries. There were spots where there were huge fissures to avoid. I wonder now, fifty years later if that bridge is gone and there exists just one quarry. What color would it be? Maybe azure?

Getting to the other side of the quarries I come to a small woodlot with another path leading to the most peaceful place in this paradise.  It is simply a field. It’s December and nothing is growing so all I can see is an unmarked blanket of white, surrounded on one side by slate dumps and the other by trees. So quiet, it makes me stop to just be mindful of what I have in my life. Who knew that my meditation history would start in a secluded field high above my hometown.  When the trees were bare, like they were this December you could look down upon snowy Slatington, a very pretty sight.

I would walk through the field to the other end where there is a narrow gap between slate piles that leads out to the Old Road, not the Old Town Road!  From here I would walk down the, then dirt, road back to town.

December in a young boy’s paradise. Could it get any better than that?

I hope this little trip down memory lane brought back some memories from your childhood. Keep those memories in your heart, because most likely those places are no longer the same.

Still have leftover turkey? How about stuffing, or as those of us who grew up in Slatington say, filling?  I know, it’s not quite time to step on a scale yet. Another Thanksgiving behind us .

I have, as clients, a young married couple who have in-law issues. This is not uncommon!  We spent a session talking about their holiday traditions and how they are affected by their in-law strife.  This got me thinking about the holidays, Thanksgiving especially, and how they change over our lifetimes.

As little kids, Thanksgiving probably didn’t have a big impact.  We got to play with our cousins and probably we got asked a lot of questions about what we want for Christmas. Yay!  Oh, and the ever popular long weekend off from school.

In our teens, in addition to the days off from school, we were probably more interested in Thanksgiving football rivalries than a big meal with family.  I miss those football rivalry games. There are only a handful still played.  Slatington’s Thanksgiving Day rival was Palmerton. The first high school footbal game I ever saw in my life was Slatington/Palmerton. I must have been about six. The game was played at our stadium in Victory Park.  Slatington lost, 25 to 0.

But I digress. When we are young and married with children, that’s when traditions start to take hold for us. The holiday takes on more importance as does the thought of family as an important entity.  This is also when conflict arises. Whose parents will we visit this year?  Whose parents will be hurt? Usually, the inevitable compromise is lunch at one house and dinner at the next. Of course, it MUST be reversed the following year. Someone will remember!

As our parents age, there comes a time when the big day transitions to one of the children.  Aging parents often fight this. It is a sign of transition. It is a symbol of “now my children have to take care of me”. Eventually, the parents resign themselves to the new arrrangement, just as they resign themselves to the thought of aging.  Let’s just make the best of it.

Back to my client couple. The wife began to cry when she thought of her grandmother. Her grandmother was the matriarch for many years and her home was a social center for holidays. Now grandma lives in a nursing home hours from any family members and will be spending this Thanksgiving alone.

Time goes by so fast. Too fast. I hope you got good deals on the Black Friday. I spent my day hiking the trails of Lehigh Gap Nature Center.  I saved 100%.

Yesterday, while I was driving more slowly on Route 309, Guns n Roses came on the radio. “Sweet Child of Mine” was the song. A great song it is!  Whenever I hear it I think of my daughter, Amy, who died in 1989. She loved Guns n Roses. Their name is on her headstone in Sky  View Cemetery, Hometown, PA.

A few months before her death, Dreams Come True Foundation sent her, her mom, and her best friend to California to meet Guns n Roses.  They got to spend several hours with them at a rehearsal. I am told that they treated Amy very well and were down to earth. Duff McKagan, bass guitarist, and his girlfriend took Amy under their wings.  That day was a thrill that Amy kept until her death a few months later.

Here’s my question. Do they remember her?  On a quiet Sunday afternoon, do any of them, out of the blue think about that day in 1989 when that sweet girl from Tamaqua came to visit. Probably not. But I’d like to think so. I know that every now and then a memory will pop into my head of some kid I hadn’t seen since fourth grade.  So, it could happen to Axl or Slash or Duff too, I suppose.

I remember I read a book one time whose premise was interesting. The writer’s thought was that after we die, we remain “alive” as a soul as long as there is someone still living that remembers us.  As soon as that last person dies, our soul ceases to exist.  I’m not saying that I believe this, but wow, what a concept.

So, bringing it all back to Amy, does it matter if Guns n Roses remembers her? I don’t think so. What matters is that she got to enjoy that three hour moment. That’s a good reminder to all of us to enjoy what we have while we have it. Maybe not just enjoy it but savor it and cherish it. Things change in an instant.

The Beatles come to mind again. “In My Life” . “There are places I’ll remember….some have gone and some remain… Lovers and friends I still can recall. Some are dead and some are living, In my life I’ve loved them all…..

I’ll write next after Thanksgiving. If you are with family that day, remember to enjoy, savor, and cherish!

People with red cars get more speeding tickets than other drivers. That’s the conventional wisdom. I don’t know if it is true. I recently bought a new Subaru Crosstrek. It is orange. Sunshine Orange to be exact. It is brighter than any red car I have seen. When I bought it, I thought about the possibility of increasing my chance of being pulled over.  I bought it anyway, and I love it.

So I am about 6 weeks into ownership of “Sunny” and last night, at 10 PM, on my way home from work I get pulled over by a State Police officer.  My first thought was, I’m going to ask if it is because my car is orange!  I wanted to, but, of course, I didn’t.

I was driving north on 309, in Orefield, a 35 MPH speed zone. I passed the well hidden officer who I saw in my peripheral vision. I immediately looked at my speedometer, 50. Damn!  Then I see him pull out behind me and know I am doomed.  He was very polite, and very young. I think he was surprised to see this 67 year old in a bright orange Crosstrek. He asked for my license and registration. I gave him my registration and told him my license is in my wallet which is in my work bag in the back seat. I’m thinking if I have to reach for my license in the back seat he’ll think I am going for a gun and soon I will be on face down on the gravel with a knee on my back! But then I remembered I am white and I relaxed a bit. Oops, no politics.

Actually, he was very professional and cordial and said he didn’t need me to get the license.  After a few minutes he gave me a warning instead of a ticket. He also gave me a little lecture about speed. It seems I got that same lecture from an officer on Rt. 22 a few years ago. I appear to be a slow learner. It seems I am also lucky not to have gotten a ticket, twice.

In my defense (really there is no defense, I was speeding), I had a long day at the office. My first client was at 8 AM and my last client ended at 9:30 PM, with lots and lots of clients in between.  For those of you who think being a counselor is a cushy job, it’s not. You have to be “on” every minute of every session and you are expected to contribute something wise every now and then! I’m not so sure about the wise thing. As noted above, I am a slow learner!   But in other words, I just wanted to get home!!

So there is my tale of woe. I expect no sympathy. Like all of us, we have to live with the consequences of our actions.  My biggest regret is that I never asked him if I was pulled over, at least partly, because my car is orange. Maybe next time!

 

All You Need is Love. Love Makes the World Go Round. Love is a Many Splendored Thing. Love Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry. True Love Ways.  Crazy Little Thing Called Love.  Even… Love Shack!

Yes. Love is all around us. Its virtues are extolled in song and film.  We all know how important love is. But I wonder, is there such a thing as too much love? The Buddha famously said that desire is the cause of all suffering.  Are desire and love the same thing? Sometimes yes. Sometimes no.

I remember 1976 when my daughter, Amy, was in Kindergarten. She was so excited to see her friends at the bus stop in the morning that she would hug them so tightly they would try to get free. She loved them and that is how she showed it. But for them, it was too much love.

There are other types of love. Some people love food. Some people love their jobs. Some people love naps!

Can you love food too much?  Of course! Too much Breyer’s Vanilla can cause high cholesterol. Too many carbohydrates can cause diabetes. Too many nuts and seeds can cause diverticulitis.

How about your job? Those who love their job too much can spend too little time with their families.  Loving work too much means missing your kids’ school activities. They can work and work and work and at retirement they don’t know what to do with themselves.

Naps?  If you love naps too much you may waste much of your day. You may find it hard to sleep at night. You may never clean your house! I kid…I love naps!

But bringing it back to romantic love, is it possible for there to be too much of that?  Hard to imagine, but yes.  Unrequited love, love that is not returned, is too much.  Some people pine their lives away, because they have too much love in their heart.  Too much love, that is not reciprocal, can cause depression and worse.  Too much unrequited love has its songs too:  I Can’t Make You Love Me. Sitting, Waiting, Wishing. Something I Can Never Have. You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away.

So, I think I answered my own question in the title. Maybe the Beatles song, “It’s Only Love” is the way to think about it!

How was that for going a little deeper?