100! One hundred! Today is my 100th post in this blog. It’s been a lot of fun for me and I hope my readers have enjoyed my blog as well. In my opinion, some of them have been very good and some of them have been stinkers. The vast majority fell in the great middle.  It’s like the standard normal curve that I used to hope the teacher would use in school to save my grade!

100 is a good time for a reassessment. Do I still enjoy writing my blog? Yes. Is my readership still out there? Yes. It’s been steady and growing a little. I love my readers! Are there enough things to write about? Of course! It’s a big, wonderful world out there.

My most read posts, and the ones that have received the most comments, are when I write about growing up in a small town in the late 50s and the 60s.  My high school years seem to be as interesting to my readers as they are to me. Anyone who has been a regular reader of my blog knows how I love nostalgia and how much I loved growing up in my small town, Slatington.

So here is the evolution part. Going forward most, if not all, of my blogposts are going to be about growing up in the one square mile of memories on the west bank of the Lehigh River. From my grade school days at Lincoln Elementary to the day I graduated from Slatington High School with my 120 classmates in 1970.

I hope my readers, who couldn’t care less about Slatington, will stick around to read about life in a small town during the wonder years. I hope my Slatington readers will tell their friends about the new focus.  It’s another adventure…and one I am looking forward to. I hope you are as well.

I looked out my window this morning and saw the snowflakes coming down. A brief moment of glee followed by a  moment of panic. Winter is coming.  I sound like a Game of Thrones fan saying that. But it is true. Winter is coming.   I have a love/hate relationship with winter.  I know a lot of us do.

In my youth I thought winter was wonderful.  It may be just nostalgia speaking but I seem to remember more big snows back then and very few freezing rain events. Cars parked on the streets were buried in snow and you could only see their rooftops. I always enjoyed taking hikes after a snowstorm, once roads were plowed and cindered. Do they still put cinders on roads, or just salt?  I would hike down along the creek and up into the slate dumps (the huge mountains of waste slate) that were just outside of town.

We would ice skate on a slate quarry that was only a block or two  from Main Street. The PennLynn quarry.  I always wondered who decided if it was okay to skate on there. If it wasn’t okay, it would be extremely dangerous as those quarries are deep, deep, deep. Interestingly, the quarry is no longer there. It was filled in at some point and is now part of the borough maintenance complex.

If we weren’t ice skating we were sledding. Shooky’s path was our place to sled. It was a very steep hill behind North Street near the end of Willow Avenue. All the neighborhood kids were there. Our sledding path actually crossed a working rail line! The borough also closed some streets for sledding, but that wasn’t as much fun.

My good attitude toward winter started to change when I started driving. To this day, I hate driving in snow, sleet, or freezing rain. I remember one of the first times I drove during a snowstorm, I lost control coming down First Street in Slatington and crashed into a fence. Yeah, not the best at winter driving.

I am also not a big fan of the cold. I think as I have gotten older I find it harder to get and stay warm. Maybe that is why my best friend recently announced a move to Florida!

Well, it is snowing even harder now! It is very pretty against the pine trees in my back yard. That is one thing you can say about snow…it is pretty.  That’s the only good thing to say about it!

I am ending this post on a winter positive note. Since I am semi-retired, and only work two days a week, my encounters with winter driving will be fewer. If it snows on a Monday, Tuesday, Friday, Saturday, or Sunday, I can just look out the window, pull my bedcovers up, and either go back to sleep or jump into the warmth of a good book.

 

No. Not a post about the greatest band that ever lived. You can take this title literally. My baby, my youngest child, my sixteen year old Emma, is driving my car. That’s right, she passed her learner’s permit test on Tuesday and is now driving my car.  It’s still hard to believe!

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. Charles Dickens sure got that right and he wasn’t even talking about his kid learning to drive.  It is the best of times because it is time for her to drive. She is responsible. She will be a good driver. It is the worst of times because she is growing up way too fast.

About an hour after getting her permit she took over the wheel at Parkland High School. She drove all around the campus in the rain. She really did well. We took one drive on a country road. She did well there too.  It’s all good and next May she will get her license and be out there on her own.  That’s when the real worry will start!

I thought about how the Lehigh Valley has changed since I learned to drive in 1968. There were not as many people. There were not as many cars. There were not as many highways. There was less, or maybe even non-existent, road rage. People were kinder back then.  I learned to drive mostly outside of Walnutport on a, mostly void of houses, back road that goes by Bunker Hill Beagle Club.  I drove on that road recently…housing developments everywhere.

So Emma will be learning to drive in the more cars, more highways environment. That is probably a good thing. Like the Pennsylvania Guide for Parents of Learning Drivers says “The more they drive in different environments, the better driver they will be.”

My fingers are crossed for a good driving experience for her. I hope this is not an omen. But I ordered a set of Student Driver car magnets. I was excited to get them. I got home from work last night, and there leaning against my door was a package from Amazon. I get in the house, tear the package open, and what do you think I find?  I find a packing slip that says car magnets. So far so good.  I get to the actual merchandise and it is…a book of piano sheet music, entitled Jim Brickman Hope. I don’t even play the piano! No magnets!

Magnets or not, the learning to drive process has started. And it will not stop. She is growing up. Another milestone has been passed.  Good things ahead!

 

Today it has been four weeks since I first visited my sorceress. I mean my nutritionist. Four weeks ago today I started on a diet that is designed for weight loss and glucose reduction.  I have been following the diet faithfully with two exceptions. I ate birthday cake for my daughter’s birthday and I had a hamburger barbecue yesterday at a horse show that went on much longer than I anticipated. It was delicious by the way. Not the horse show, the barbecue.

My results have been excellent. I have lost fourteen pounds. When I had my second nutritionist appointment last week, I was at a twelve pound weight loss which included a loss of 7.9 pounds of actual body fat!  I have a definite increase in energy. I sleep better. I am having fewer “digestive” issues.  In other words, physically, I am improving my life and maybe adding years to it. At least I hope so.

Mentally, however, I wonder if it is all worth it. I believe that my quality of life has diminished in some ways.  So while I may get a few more years, will those years be without one of my favorite things, eating the foods I enjoy.  I understand that I am in the weight loss part of the diet. When I get to my stated weight loss goal (14 more to go) I will be able to introduce sweets back into my diet in minor ways.  But I will never be able to enjoy the foods I love in the same way I did.

I really miss doughnuts. There are almost always doughnuts at work. I used to eat one after every other session. Boston Cream and French Crullers were my favorites. Now there are more doughnuts for my colleagues at Bethlehem Counseling Associates.  I know that my office neighbor, Bill Dougherty, is pleased with that!

I miss stopping at Weis for a few packs of Peanut Butter Kandy Kakes. I liked to put them in the freezer. When I ate them I would bite the frozen chocolate all around the outside and finish it off with the middle sponge cake and peanut butter treat!!

I miss siting down to TV with a pint of Hagen Daz Swiss Vanilla Almond Ice Cream.  The almonds were so evenly spaced in the pint that every spoonful contained an almond. I would let the vanilla ice cream melt in my mouth and then finish the spoonful off by crunching on the sweet delectable almond.  Yum!

I now avoid the bakery department at Wegmans. It was rare for me to cruise through that section without buying a piece of the most delicious white cake ever created.  Their black and white cookies are to die for too! Now I spend more time in produce. Oh boy. Kale vs. Cake. Yikes!

I love Middle Eastern food. Luckily I can still eat it, but, of course, in moderation. Damn you Ben Franklin and your famous quote “All things in moderation”. I’ve seen depictions  of you, Ben. I don’t think you followed your own advice!  Back to Middle Eastern food.  No more Baklava. The light layers of filo crust, interspersed with ground walnuts and sweet rose water glaze.  What is falafel without baklava? What is a kefta kabob without baklava? What is a spinach pie without baklava? I’ll tell you what it is. It’s a lower quality of life!

So, like so many things in life, it is all about balance. Eventually, I can eat a piece of baklava again. But that piece will be much smaller. I will need to savor every bite. There is a life lesson there. Enjoy the good things in life. Savor every good moment.  You don’t know when they will no longer be a part of your life.  Think about quality of life and what it means to you, personally.

It is almost time for my mid morning snack of yogurt, the highlight of my eating day. Today it is Chobani Black Cherry Greek Yogurt.  I know for the few minutes that I am eating it, my quality of life will be good!

 

 

 

 

That title is a term that has just about left our everyday world.  What it referred to was a newspaper printing an extra edition because something major had happened. I just wrote the word newspaper,  another term that is disappearing from our lives. I miss newspapers. Sure, they still exist, but in much shorter form. Yes, you can read a newspaper online, but…..really? No. Not the same.

I grew up in a newspaper reading family. My dad, especially, loved reading the Morning Call every morning over coffee.  We even, for a while, also subscribed to the Evening Chronicle, the Morning Call’s evening edition. Yes, Allentown, for a long time, had two newspapers a day! I read recently that the Morning Call presses have stopped and the paper is now printed somewhere in New Jersey.  Sad. Bigly sad.

The Sunday paper was an especially big deal. My dad had a particular order in which he read the Sunday paper. He always ended with the funnies and the Parade Magazine.  When I still got the paper, I read it the same way. Traditions die hard.

I continued the newspaper reading tradition as long as I could. There came a point, maybe in the early ’90s, where they did away with newspaper boys and girls who delivered in their neighborhoods. They instead went to motor routes and inconsistent deliveries. Eventually, tired of reading the Morning Call at night instead of the morning, I gave up.

I just cannot get into reading the paper on-line. Maybe it’s because I am 66. Maybe it’s because I like the smell of a real newspaper and the feel of ink on my hands. Maybe it’s just that it seems so impersonal.  I do, most Sundays, buy a copy of the New York Times. Now that is a newspaper! I can literally spend an entire afternoon reading it.

Before ending this post about newspapers, here is a shout out to The Slatington News. It was my hometown paper growing up and it was printed once a week. There was very little news (not a lot of news in Slatington!), but it was the best way to know what the school cafeteria was serving next week and the starting times for church services.

There are still local newspapers, who print mostly feature stories, that are published weekly. My daughter, Emma, is going to be writing for one of them, the Parkland Gazette.

For those of you who still read a real newspaper, I salute you!

As most of you know, I am an only child…with four siblings. That’s because when I was born my siblings were between the ages of 11 and 18.  When my parents moved from Slatington’s Franklin Street to Dowell Street, I was six years old at the time, I was the only kid left at home. Now I am down to two siblings. My oldest brother and my sister both died when they were 65. (I am 66…whew!) Cancer claimed both their lives.

Here is a picture of my still living big brothers and me.

I didn’t realize, until I saw this picture, that I am the shortest.

On the right is my brother Jim. He turned 80 last month. On the left is my brother Gary. He turns 78 in January. I admire them both. In my family we don’t talk much about our feelings. So they probably don’t know how much I admire them. But I do. Here’s why.

They are both smart and funny and care very much about their families.  Both were blue collar workers all their lives, and both built beautiful homes and have secure  retirements.

Jim and his wife will be celebrating their 60th wedding anniversary very soon. Gary and his wife are at 58. They are both close to all their children and both have withstood the ups and downs that life brings in the form of health scares and family dramas.  I always looked up to their marriages and hoped to emulate that. Unfortunately, I have been married…lets just say, more than once.  I’m not complaining. My life has been pretty awesome as well.

Individually, my brother Jim helped me when my mom died. He and his wife, Eileen, allowed me and my dad to move in with them. That was during my high school years. During those years, Jim was as much a father to me as my own dad was.

Gary helped me get a job with Pfizer. He and I both worked together in the old dirty green pigments factory I have written about before. Getting that job started a trajectory to where I am, careerwise, today.

Those are just two examples of the advantages of having big brothers.  I am who I am partly because of them.

I want to close with just a quick funny story of how my brothers also aren’t saints, though I may have portrayed them that way.  When I turned twelve, I went hunting. My first hunting trip with my two brothers was quite the shock.  I never heard my brother Jim curse before, not in my first twelve years.  F bombs were flying!!  Haha. So my first hunting memory was not the first rabbit or pheasant I shot, but how much my big brother cursed!!

I love them both and hope to have many more years with them. Today, I am going on hike with my granddaughter…can’t wait! More memories to be made.

 

 

 

 

Halloweening is what we called it when I was a kid growing up in Slatington. No one said trick or treating.

We always did our Halloweening on Halloween! What a concept!  It wasn’t the closest Friday to Halloween. It was Halloween! School night be damned! October 31 was the night to get in our costumes and descend en masse on the uptown and downtown neighborhoods of my small town. It was always fun. It was always innocent. It was, for sure, a simpler time.

I can remember my first Halloween costume. I was a devil! I think, back then, that all Halloween costumes were made by the same company, with the same materials, and with hard plastic masks.  Collegeville, PA comes to mind as the place where they were made. That may just be a false memory.  The favorite costume I wore was the year I was Popeye. It had big mesh puffy sleeves as if I had just ate a can of spinach!

My memory says that a large majority of homes were open to receiving Halloweeners. We used to make out like thieves, with our bags of real candy. Yes, real candy!  Full size chocolate candy bars!! I feel bad for the kids today coming home with a bag full of tiny packages of Sweet Tarts and other non-chocolate “treats”.

I wonder how many of my Slatington readers will remember this from Halloweening: The absolute best house to visit was the Dr. Haines house on Washington Street. You know why?  Cash!! If you were lucky there could be five and ten dollar bills in your bag!

It was an innocent time. There were absolutely no fears of being abducted while going door to door for candy.  There were no fears of razor blades in apples.  It was a wonderful time to grow up and I miss it dearly.

Speaking of Halloween. Emma and I are going tomorrow night for the 40th anniversary screening of the original Halloween. She has never seen it and I can’t wait for her reaction.  It is showing, one time only, at Frank Banko Ale House Cinema at Artsquest in Bethlehem. Join us!

Big rainy Nor’easter is supposed to wash away the weekend in the Lehigh Valley. Better get out the door and get my hike in!

 

Are you confused and befuddled when you are so certain that something  is going to happen, and then it doesn’t?  You are so certain it will happen because it has happened to you at least 40 times before, consecutively.  You are sure it will happen because you talk to other people and they have experienced the same universal truth.  This happened to me this weekend. Confused and befuddled, yes. Shocked and awed, yes. Happy and grinning ear to ear, yes and double yes!

What am I talking about? I’m talking about the simple act of purchasing a new pair of glasses…lenses and frames. My universal truth about buying glasses was that you can never walk out of an optician’s shop without spending at least $500! I don’t care how many coupons you have nor what kind of insurance you carry. I don’t care how many buy one get one offers are on the table. I don’t care if it is their President’s Day Sale or their New School Year Extravaganza.  I don’t care if you are a tough negotiator and fight off all of the attempts to sell you extras! You are going to walk out of the place at least $500 poorer.

Until you don’t!!  Friday I took Emma to get new glasses. I was dreading it.  Not the experience, just the opening of the wallet.  We were using her mom’s new insurance.  I had no idea how good or bad that might be.  The bill came to $550 but insurance knocked it down to $140! What?! Did I hear that right? A universal truth uncovered to be a falsehood. Yes! We walked out of there “saving” $410! Cinnabons on me!! Well, Cinnabon, because I am still on my nutritionist diet. Ugh.

A shout out to Emma who chose her new frames systematically and efficiently. She started at one end of the women’s’ frames wall and picked one she liked. Then she held that pair and compared it to another she liked. The winner of the two continued on and on. In other words, she never was comparing more that two pair of glasses at a time. The pair she was holding at the other end of the wall was the pair we purchased. No second guessing. No looking back. Brilliant!

Enjoy your day! In the Lehigh Valley it appears to be cold and blustery. A perfect day for busting universal truths!

There is frost on the grass. There is orange in the forest. There is pumpkin spice in the air. All signs of late October. Halloween just ahead.  It’s the perfect time for a ghost story or maybe just a “ghost” story.  This is a true story based on a time in my childhood where the Lehigh Valley was transfixed by events occurring in the small canal town of Walnutport, just across the Lehigh River from my beloved Slatington.

Here was the Morning Call headline on an October day in 1963:  Thing Seekers Jam Walnutport!.

What was the “thing” that was jamming seekers into Walnutport! It was an albino woman! Yes, an albino woman. I know there are albino women in the world, but this was no ordinary albino woman. Reports were that she only appeared at night and in only one location, the canal towpath.  Other reports were that she could run at speeds of up to eighty miles per hour and that she would eerily smile at people driving by in cars, as she passed them, along Canal Street!  The Woman in White…that’s some scary stuff right there.

But was it true? Of course not!  But enough people believed in her, and came out to see her, that one night fire trucks could not get to a barn fire on Canal Street because of the throngs of thing seekers. The barn burned to the ground.  The hysteria of the albino woman also burned to the ground, in that it died out after cooler heads prevailed. The general consensus is that some parents told their kids this story in order to keep them off the canal at night.  The story got legs and ran right into the Morning Call newsroom.

How do these legends and myths get started and why do some continue for generations?  Bigfoot. The Loch Ness Monster. Champy. The Abominable Snowman. Ghosts, vampires, and werewolves (werewolf? there wolf. A little shout out to my favorite comedy movie Young Frankenstein). I think it is because we all like to be a little scared. We like to think that maybe life isn’t all figured out and there is some mystery out there.  Logical minds would say that is ridiculous. I will confess that I am still a believer in bigfoot in the Great Northwest. That may come from flying over that area so often and seeing the vast areas of nothingness! It may also come from my desire to think that there is a little mystery out there. In Oregon, if not in Walnutport.

The Albino Woman did make one more appearance in the 1990s. She appeared on a boat on the canal during one of the first Walnutport Canal Festivals. She didn’t run 80 miles per hour. I know that for a fact because this Woman in White was my best friend Christy Haydt’s wife, Vicki. I know she can’t run that fast!

I am looking out the window and see that the frost has left the grass.  Time to get outdoors and go for a hike. I hope I don’t run into the Yeti of Trexler Nature Preserve!  Wish me luck and safety, please.

 

 

 

This past Friday night I got to see the new play “26 Pebbles”. It was performed by the students of Parkland High School. It was wonderful.  Parkland was chosen as one of the few high schools in the nation that was allowed to produce this play. They did a marvelous job.

Spoiler alert: the play is no longer being performed here in the Lehigh Valley. If you live in an area where it may be performed soon, there are minimal spoilers ahead.

The play is about the school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary, in Newtown, CT, eleven days before Christmas in 2012.  I’m sure you remember this one, even though school shootings have become commonplace. Twenty first graders and six teachers lost their lives that day. The shooter and his mother also died that same day.

I didn’t know what to expect from the play. Was it going to be terribly sad (tissues were ready)? Was it going to be violent?  Was it going to be political?  It was sad, but gave a message of hope.  The violence itself was handled appropriately in that we did not see the shootings.  It was not political at all.

The characters in the play were mostly people who helped in the aftermath and the parents of surviving children.  The scenes went from a few weeks before the shooting to six months after. Again, it was not political. It showed the anti-gun and pro-gun sides. It showed the press as intrusive monsters and as people affected by doing a hard but necessary job.  It showed the shooter as both evil and as a product of his life with mental illness.

The students who played these characters were amazing. The preparation for performing in this play involved an immersion into the shooting itself. They did projects to learn the stories of the victims. They had Skype conversations with students who survived and with parents. They met with grief counselors to better understand the process.  As always, Parkland High School goes the extra mile.

The play is no longer being performed at Parkland. If you saw it, I hope you agree with my post. If you missed it, it’s your loss.

I’ll close with the overarching message of the play: We are love. We are Newtown.