It’s been two months since I stopped writing blog posts. It appears that has been too long. It turns out I missed writing the posts. I stopped mostly because I thought I was running out of things to write about.  I think I just need to go a little deeper. I hope you missed them too and we can pick up where we left off.

Speaking of going a little deeper…I’m sure you noticed the word death in my title. Don’t worry. I’m fine!  But, at 67, death is something that comes into your mind now and then.  At least it does mine.  But, again, I am fine except for an upcoming January surgery in which part of my colon will be removed because of nasty diverticulae!

I am reading a book right now called “Underland”.  The first chapter is all about burial practices from very early times. That got me thinking about how we dispose of our dead in 2019. My own early days, the 50s and 60s, there was pretty much only one way to go. Someone would die, and they would be taken to funeral home. The funeral director would prepare the body for a viewing followed by a trip to the cemetery the next day.

Today there are many options. Cremation seems to be the majority choice these days.  Other options are being buried without preparation, basically put in the ground, as is, with just a tarp.  You can also be mulched and mixed with tree seeds and become a living tree.  Of course, the traditional funeral still exists if you are old school.

As I have written before, my choice is cremation. But I have gone back and forth on what happens to my ashes.  I could be buried near my daughter, but in the cremation part of the cemetery, not really next to her. Plus, just to be buried in the cemetery cost over a thousand dollars. I’d rather that money go elsewhere.  An urn is a wonderful idea. But what happens a few generations later and someone now has my ashes and they only know I was from some earlier generation. They may know almost nothing about me. What then…the dumpster?  I hope not.

My compromise position is to have my kids put my ashes into Slatington’s Trout Creek, at the old trestle that is the beginning of the section of the creek that was the setting of my childhood. Good times. And yes, I know it is illegal to put remains into a public waterway. But I have been a rule follower all of my life. My first and last act of anarchy!   Anyway, it would be my kids getting arrested, not me!

So that ends my return to blogging. I intend to write again soon. Perhaps on a more upbeat topic, like the great smelling brownies I just took out of my oven.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I remember writing a blogpost once about my lack of will power and follow through.  I think that myth has been dispelled with this blogpost today.  This is my 180th blogpost! And they said it wouldn’t last.  My posts have been read over 5000 times.  Thank you, readers!!

But sometimes, things that you think will last forever, don’t.  Today is my last blogpost. We all change. It’s part of our human nature.  I have been changing as I grow older. I am becoming more self reflective. That increased self reflection has led me to the decision to turn my writing inward. Maybe I will spend the next years writing that ever elusive great American novel.  Maybe I will write some poetry worth publishing.  Maybe I will spend my last years watching TV from the sofa. Okay, that last one is doubtful.

I’ve had fun writing my blog.  I think I introduced small town life in the ’60s to a lot of people. I enjoyed writing about my hometown of Slatington, the best and most underappreciated small town in the Lehigh Valley.  I know I have written about, or at least mentioned, the Beatles often.  Their music and their influences follow me still.

I’ve tried to teach little lessons in my blogposts.  Not that I have led such a wonderful life that I presume I can teach others how to live. My lessons come mostly from mistakes I have made in my very fallible life.

So, that’s it. I wish all of you well. I hope you have the best life you can possibly have. Don’t beat yourself up about bad decisions. They are a part of life. Try to find contentment with what you have right now. It is more than what most of the world has.  I hope you find love in your life that shakes you to your core, that makes you want to be a better person, and that loves you with no reservations and conditions. Lastly, get outside and enjoy nature! Its beauty and wonder is out there, just steps away.

I’ll end with the Beatles. “And in the end…the love you take…is equal to the love you make.”

 

 

You know me. Nostalgia is my middle name!  Did you ever have one of those jobs, early in your work career that was just plain fun?  A job, that when you think back, may have been one of the best work experiences of your life? I did. In the early seventies, for about two years, I was a stock clerk at the Weis Markets in the Whitehall Mall.

It didn’t start out good though. I started in the meat department. My job was to arrange chicken legs, thighs, and breasts on those Styrofoam trays.  They had to be arranged in a certain way. I was never good with seeing a diagram, or being explained how to do something technical, and getting it right. Think of a picture of a knot and being asked to tie it the same way.  I couldn’t do it! Heinz, my boss and a former German WWII soldier, was not a nice man and I frustrated him greatly. Luckily, I got out of the meat department after two weeks. Besides, it was freezing in there.

But the fun began then. We had a great group of guys, all about the same age, stocking shelves during the day while the store was open.  We had our regular customers that we got to know.  We had our lunches in the mall.  We had our beautiful woman alert, so that not one of us was in the back room when a beautiful woman entered the store! Remember, we were all men in our late teens or very early twenties.

We had fun. There was the time when our dairy guy was filling up the dairy case when a mouse ran from the back room into his aisle. He told the mouse to “get back in there” and the mouse turned around and went into the back. There was the time I was in the aisle and opened a previously opened box of split peas, and it was filled with cockroaches which promptly ran all over the floor!  I don’t want you to think that Weis was a dirty place. It wasn’t. I assume this was typical of grocery stores back then.  We used to “accidentally” rip a hole in a bag of chips or cookies so we could snack all day long.

One of the stock clerks was a body builder. He had some massive shoulders and arms. But conveniently, whenever fifty pound bags of sugar were coming off the truck to be unloaded, he would disappear.  We had a cardboard box baler that would crush boxes into a manageable bundle that had to be tied with metal wire. No one liked doing this, including me.  We would avoid it as long as we could, which would only make the bale bigger and harder to tie! Going out into the parking lot and gathering shopping carts to make a big train, which we pushed back into the store, was great fun. We tried to always set a record for how many carts were in one train.

I can still remember some of the prices that we had to ink stamp on the packages. 33 cents for Hawaiian Punch and 29 cents for Hi-C.  Baby food was 9 cents a jar!  Good times.

There are more stories to tell about this job. The interesting people in produce, the women who ran the registers, and the interesting group of managers.  One year our Christmas party was just a group of us drinking Southern Comfort while sitting on big bundles of paper bags in the back room. Again, good times!

I hope this post made you think about some of your early jobs and that you can think back on them fondly.  Every time I go in a grocery store, and see a solid wall of  cans, bottles, or boxes, my heart beats a little faster! Remembering good times.

It’s been a while since I wrote about my wonderful home town of Slatington. I am in the middle of writing case notes for my job so I thought a little diversion can’t hurt.

Earlier today I drove down Main Street and made the left onto North Walnut. This is the last leg of Route 873, which ends at Lehigh Gap.

When I was a kid this was a bustling, commercial and industrial center right outside of town.  Today it is kind of sad to see what is left of the area. I think the commercial initiative moved across the river to Walnutport and Route 145. In Walnutport you can find a McDonalds, a Burger King, and a Taco Bell. No fast food in Slatington! You can take that as a positive or a negative, of course!

So what was on that last leg of Route 873 when I was a kid?  Ready for a trip down Memory Lane?  In this one mile stretch of road there were two busy factories: Keystone Lamp Manufacturing and Pfizer. There were restaurants: Herman’s, the Green Lantern Drive-In (later The Big Top), and Valley Green Inn. There was the Slate Bowl, Table Supply Supermarket, and a gas station.  There was Sunland Park and  Slatington Airport.  All in one little stretch of blacktop.

Of all the businesses I just mentioned, only Slatington Airport and the bowling alley remain.  Both of those are just shells of their former selves.  The businesses that are no longer there have been replaced by storage units, a karate studio, and vacant lots.

If you want to be happy and productive, learn to enjoy change!  I have to remind myself of that once in a while.

LGBTQ. What do those letters mean to you? To me, they are a collection of letters representing people who want to be happy, to have food, clothing, and shelter, and to be content with as little drama as possible. In other words, people just like you or me. Why are so many in an uproar of people wanting to love other people. Isn’t there enough hate in this world? Why can’t we be happy that someone loves someone else. Who cares about gender!

Don’t worry. This is not a political rant, though I could easily go there! This is not a political blog, so let me turn 180 degrees and talk about food….and gender!

Remember, a few years back, there was a best selling book called “Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche”? Quiche apparently is a feminine food! Is it because eggs come from chickens? That can’t be it. Real men love themselves some hard boiled eggs.  Is it because of the pastry crust? That can’t be it. Real men love themselves a good piece of apple pie!  So where did this idea come from and why did it stick?  I have no idea!

So if quiche, and its cousin the crepe, is a feminine food, what is a masculine food? I know! I know! It’s barbecue!  Today I drove by Bad Bones Barbecue on Mauch Chunk Road. That got me thinking about how barbecue places almost always have the names of macho, mean, and nasty caricatures. Bad Bones, Grumpy, Bubba’s, Butch’s, Porky’s etc.  So what makes barbecue a man’s food? I have no idea! I know some real women who love to sink their teeth into a good juicy barbecue and even throw on the hot sauce!

So I say, in the areas of love AND food, lets embrace all of it! Food is good. Love is good. Like the Beatles said, “Love is All You Need”. Well, that and food!

Sure, I know, the title is another great Beatles song.  That’s not the feeling I am talking about though.  I am talking about a feeling that comes over me every once in a while. It’s a mixed feeling that contains a little excitement, a little envy, and a lot of  love.

I was overcome by this feeling, this Saturday, as I got to help a friend move her daughter into college for her freshman year.  I’ve gotten the same feeling at high school plays and musicals.  I remember tearing up when they played “Over the Rainbow” at Emma’s kindergarten orientation.  That was that feeling once again.  High school graduations spark it. So do spelling bees and science fairs. I know, I tend to be a sensitive male. Not that there is anything wrong with that!

I think the trigger for these feeling is seeing kids in a position of great potential.  To me it is so exciting to imagine the kind of lives these kids can have.  So that is the excitement part of my mixed feelings feeling. The love part comes from my sense of optimism and hope. I think you all know how positive I feel about life and the world we live in!  I want every one of these kids to have an awesome life. Yes, I love them all.  Even the ones that can, at times, be a pain in the ass.

So that leaves the envy part. I am 67. My days of potential are pretty much past me. Oh sure, there are lots of things, still, to do and to learn. But really, I think I am left with living vicariously through our youth. And that’s okay.

I think this is why I love coming of age movies and books so much. The testing, that a kid faces that makes them into the adults they become, is fascinating to me.  Think of the movies “Stand By Me” and “Mystic Pizza”.  How about the book “The Catcher in the Rye”. Wow! I think I should have become a teacher. Alas, too late now.

So, as another school year is about to start, I will continue to cheer for and support all the kids I know who are about to try new things.  Let the school plays, chorus concerts, science fairs, spelling bees, athletic contests begin.  I will be here with my envy and my memories. I was that kid once. It was a long time ago in a little town called Slatington and in a high school now called Northern Lehigh.  It was the start of something wonderful. Ahhh, to be seventeen again!

 

Yesterday I was driving to Rhode Island. At one point I looked at my speedometer and noticed I was going 95 mph!  But the weird thing is, I was just going with the flow.  It reminded me of a saying my dad used to use when someone was going fast. He would say “That guy is going a mile a minute!”.  For you non-mathy people, a mile a minute is 60 mph.  In fairness to my dad, he was born in 1910. Things were so much slower then.  My dad had some other sayings like referencing “JoJo the Dog Faced Boy” or “Clean your plate, think of the starving Armenians.” But those are for another day.

When I am driving my mind tends to go in all kinds of directions. Luckily, the car goes in one! I remembered how highways looked in my youth. Before the anti-littering campaign of the early sixties, the roads were littered with tons of trash. It was common practice back then for you to finish your delicious ice cream sundae in the car and just throw it out the window! What were we thinking!?

Then I remembered the bottle of Pub after shave I used to carry in my glove compartment as a teen. You never knew when you needed to smell good! Good looking Slatington girls were around every corner. Back home there were probably bottles of Hai Karate, English Leather, and maybe some Jade East.

That got me thinking about products that were big back in the day and are just not seen anymore. Ipana toothpaste and the iconic Bucky Beaver mascot was one.  Happy Nut was like a stick of butter except it was peanut butter with a core of jelly. Yum!  Great Shakes was an awesome drink. Every package came with a packet of powder, vanilla or chocolate, and a plastic container for shaking it up when you added milk. They tasted like a soda fountain (remember them?) milkshake. I used to drink so many of them, one after another, I remember my mom telling me that, when I get older, I am going to have stomach problems. I don’t, except for its tendency to grow quickly if I am not careful.

My mind mostly was thinking about food. Probably because I was hungry. I did get to eat at Mystic Pizza to have a little slice of heaven.  A great pizza and an even better movie. One of my top five. I was thinking about how cool it would be to live in Mystic. There goes my wandering mind again!

So, in conclusion, I got to be in five of our great states yesterday. That is ten percent of the states we have. How cool is that! I realized how much I miss the slower pace of my youth. I am thankful that we, mostly, have stopped the stupid littering we used to do without thinking.  Mostly, I thought about the amazing life I have had so far and how much there is to look forward to. Maybe I should see if I can find a bottle of Pub on eBay. I could keep it in my glove compartment. Just for old time’s sake.

 

Those of you who have been following my blog for a while know that I am often nostalgic, humorous (at least I think so!), or self reflective.  Today my post has more of a philosophical nature.  My subject has been on my mind for a long time. It is difficult to write about because I think I am in a very small minority on this topic. In fact, I bet 99 percent of my readers will disagree with me. Don’t worry, it’s not political!

Here is the phrase I abhor:  Everything happens for a reason.  Or it’s corollary: It is all part of God’s greater plan.  To me those two phrases are like screeching chalk on a blackboard, like teeth scraping the tines of a fork, like Donald Trump’s voice.

Those of you who know me well, know that I am a Buddhist. But my feelings about my hated words have nothing to do with religion. I know that we all have our own belief systems and that no one really knows the actual truth. That’s why it is called faith.  So if you want to believe that God has a plan, for each of the  7,000,000 people on earth, then go for it!  I’m not buying it.

To me, everything happens for a reason is just a quick and easy way to explain bad things that happen to us.  Bad things happen to all of us, every day. A guy gets run over by a bus. Is that part of a plan or is it because of a choice he made to not take his eyes off his cell phone?

To me, the world is random and complicated and random and beautiful and random and crazy and random! Our lives are filled with options and choices and decisions. We probably make a thousand decisions every day. From which shoe to put on first to whether to go to Musikfest or not. That’s what makes life exciting. If I feel that someone or some thing has my life all planned out for me, well what kind of life is that?  And if I believe that, then I am not taking responsibility for my actions nor to my reactions to the actions of others.

I think that bad things happen to us because life is full of ups and downs. We would not appreciate the ups if we didn’t have downs.  We wouldn’t learn from the downs if we thought it was just part of a plan.

Thanks for letting me rant and get this out of my system. And if you say to me “everything happens for a reason”, I will just smile and nod.  I think I know why I have been thinking about this lately.  In a few days, it will be the thirtieth anniversary of my daughter’s death at the ag of seventeen. Please don’t try to tell me that her year of suffering and her missing out on an adult life was part of some greater plan.  I am a non-violent man, but whoever “planned” that deserves a punch in the face!

Back to nostalgia next post! See, I just made a decision…all on my own. ;).

 

 

 

 

 

I know you’ve been waiting for this blogpost. Those of you, like me, who are bald may find some solace here. Those of you who are not bald may learn some empathy, or at least sympathy, for those of us who suffer from, that dreaded malady, male pattern baldness.

The first thing I can say about being bald in the summertime is that it sucks!  I know. I know. This is definitely a first world problem. In our house, if someone whines about something minor, the retort is “you could be living in Afghanistan”. So, yes, this is minor and I could be living in Afghanistan. Or I could be 8 months pregnant in the summer. Well, actually, I couldn’t be. But you know what I mean.

I bet most of you think the number one summer bald issue is sunburn. It’s in the top three. Yes, your bald head is setting up there, right on top,  facing the sun , on its own, with no protection but sunscreen. But sunscreen is difficult to apply, especially if you have some hair toward the sides, like me.  Your hair is soaked in sunscreen and isn’t that attractive!?   Wear a hat you say. But when you wear a hat you get the tan face and white head top. also very attractive!

The number one issue, though is not sunburn, but sweat! Yes, all of you with hair are lucky. When the top of your head perspires, like it will in July, your hair soaks up that perspiration leaving your face just glistening a little.  Without hair up there, any bit of head sweat just rolls down in torrents into your face. Ugh. I don’t know about you, but excessive face sweat for me causes acne. Great, I can be a bald sweaty mess…with pimples!  Notice the attractiveness theme?

Lastly, those torrents of sweat run right into your eyes causing extreme burning and lack of visibility. If you wear glasses there is no way they are staying on your head. So, you carry them, walking blindly and potentially into an oncoming car. Yes, my friends, the struggle is real!

It is time to stop complaining and put on my big boy pants. After all, I could be eight months pregnant. Well, I could be living in Afghanistan.

I’ll end with a couple positives. My head is dry before I am up the ladder while exiting a pool! And, more importantly, some women apparently find bald men virile and handsome. If anyone knows where those women are, please let me know!

Don’t yell at me. I spelled it right! I’m not talking about principles…you know, like heath care should be a right and not a privilege.  I am talking about principals, the strong men and women who lead our schools. I am going to talk a little about the three principals I have had in my life.

Actually, I have had four principals. My first grade was spent in Walnutport Elementary and I have no clue who the principal was there.  The rest of my elementary school career was spent under the principalship of Mrs. Rex. It was so long ago I can’t remember her first name.  Here is what I do remember. She was a principal and a teacher. She taught a third grade class. Back then, principals did that. Ahh, simpler times.  Another thing I remember is that she looked like George Washington. Enough said about that!  She was a customer on my paper route when I was in sixth grade. She stopped gettting the paper right before Christmas, robbing me of my big Christmas tip. Grrrr!

Our junior high principal was Mr. Hagenbugh. Jay Hagenbugh.  He was a dapper man and I can remember him usually wearing a grey suit and a red bow tie. Yes, really, a bow tie.  There was definitely a Peewee Herman vibe there, except he was older and had snow white hair.  One thing about Mr. Herman, I mean Hagenbugh,  is that he was a stickler for rules and he used to make us boys wear jackets and ties on assembly days, which was every other Thursday.  Even today, on a Thursday morning, I sometimes remember that.

All four years of high school were guided by Mr. Gordon Kemp.  For some reason I picture him smoking a pipe. Were principals and teachers allowed to smoke around school in the ’60s? I can’t remember Mr. Kemp being the rah rah school spirit kind of principal. My memory serves him up as more of a low profile, government bureaucrat. I could be wrong.  I know how to get him angry though. Challenge the school dress code! I remember sitting in a meeting with him about the dress code. I was a student council officer. I actually asked him if he wouldn’t be more comfortable doing his job in shorts and a tee shirt. He was not happy with the question.

So, I can’t say that having these principals did or did not make a big difference in my life.  I can look back at them fondly and be thankful that none of them were tyrants or lawbreakers…at least as far as I know.

That was fun a nostalgic blog post to write. Unfortunately, I now really badly want to remember Mrs. Rex’s first name! Had she given me that big Christmas tip, I’m sure I would have remembered.  Think of that today and always tip well!