Catchy title, huh?  How about the chorus….I am the eggman. They are the eggmen. I am the walrus. Koo Koo Kjoob.

Hahaha. How can you not like the Beatles!? The Beatles and their wonderful music have been a part of my life since sixth grade. Their fame in America until their split coincided exactly with my adolescence.  They split in 1970, two months short of my high school graduation.

Last night I watched James Corden’s Carpool Karaoke. His guest was Paul McCartney. The video was forwarded to me by an old friend who said that if she sees anything Beatles it reminds her of me.  What a nice thought and I love the association.  James and Paul were driving around Liverpool, joking around, singing songs, and reminiscing. They visited Paul’s childhood home. We got to see the famous barbershop on Penny Lane and the equally famous roundabout…there .beneath the blue suburban sky. The show was great and you could tell that James Corden was a big fan who seemed a little in awe of Paul.

The show also brought a tear to my eye. Time is going too too fast.  It seemed like only yesterday (another great Beatles song) that I was sneaking my transistor radio into sixth grade with the hopes of hearing the Beatles arrival in New York in February of 1964.

Beatles music is wonderful, as is all things Beatles. The controversy of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, was it really about LSD. The Beatles always denied it. But Paul did admit that Got To Get You into My Life is about marijuana! The controversy of Paul Is Dead.  I can remember listening to records backwards looking for more clues into his supposed death.  I was so innocent back then and so naïve. The controversy that was caused when John declared the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. Yikes!

I have a small library of Beatle books. There is always something new to learn. The Beatles influence has been enormous in that you still see references to the Beatles music in advertising, in everyday conversations, and even in politics.  Who can know someone turning 64 and not think of When I’m Sixty-four?

There are only two Beatles still with us, Paul and Ringo.  I was lucky enough to see Paul in concert last year thanks to my daughter Emma, also a big Beatles fan.  I can remember where I was when I heard about John’s death.  I remember hearing about George’s slow death from cancer and thinking it was like watching a family member die.

I could write for hours about how I feel about the Beatles, but I doubt you would want to read for hours. So I will end with this so true Beatles lyric: And in the end…..the love you take….is equal to the love you make.

PS.  If you can catch Carpool Karaoke with Paul, try to do so. It’s a very entertaining 15 minutes and it may bring a happy tear to your eye too.

 

I am writing this post from one of the most beautiful places in the Lehigh Valley. Allentown’s Rose Gardens. Sure, Allentown is known more for its homicide rate, its preponderance of pawn shops, and its double parking. But its park system is simply wonderful and the Rose Gardens are its crowning jewel, especially in June.

 

 

I am sitting on a bench, under a shady tree. There is a slight breeze coming my way. The breeze is carrying the light, sweet fragrance of a wide variety of roses. Wow! Looking straight ahead I can see most of the twenty or more rose beds. The colors are amazing. Yellow and white and various shades of red, from pink to scarlet. Again, wow!  It is so quiet all I hear are birds chirping and the quiet trickle of a fountain.  Shhhh.

Behind me is the Old Fashioned Garden.  More colorful, but not as fragrant, these beds contain all kinds of different flowers. There are at least thirty different varieties of flowers in these long beds. Purples, yellows, blues, whites, and pinks.  They are arranged perfectly with the taller flowers in the back forming a spectacular border.

There is a level below the gardens, with walking paths between and around  four beautiful ponds, filled with lily pads, fish, and turtles.  Next to the ponds runs the Little Cedar Creek.  The bridges over the creek are a wonderful place to stop and watch the water run over the colorful rocks.

Throughout the gardens and ponds, there are tasteful sculptures of varying styles and subjects. They add an artful touch to this beautiful place.  There are plenty of benches and a gazebo to sit on to enjoy this space.

Get out there and enjoy this place. The roses begin fading in July. The Old Fashioned Garden fades not long after that. Of course, the ponds, the stream, and the paths are there all year long. So even in winter it is a special place.  But the best time to see this Allentown oasis is right now…June.

I hope one day soon I will see you there.

Note:  I figured out how to add pictures to my posts!

Want to make my daughter, Emma, angry?  Well, of course you don’t! But if you did, this is what you tell her:  Horseback riding is not a sport. Smoke will start coming from her ears! You see, she has been fighting that battle for the past ten years.

Emma has been taking lessons for the last decade. She has also showed from time to time. Last summer she won many awards for her riding. She deserved every one of them.  She works hard, comes home exhausted, and always looks forward to the next lesson or show.

But some people, mostly boys but not all, seem to think that horseback riding is easy and that it is just sitting on top of a horse who does all the work.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  Riders are not just sitting on top of a horse….they are controlling a horse. They are controlling an animal that weighs more than a thousand pounds! They are making the animal go at a particular speed, in a particular direction, and making it jump over fences.  The horse has its own personality and sometimes doesn’t want to follow directions. The rider has to make it happen.  During summer shows, the rider is dressed in thick riding pants, wearing a jacket, and wearing a helmet. Sometimes it is ninety degrees at show time.

I have seen riders fall and have to go to the hospital. I have seen bloodied faces when the rider falls face first into the gravel.  It’s a sport.

So why do so many people disagree?  Let’s start with boys. There are very few boys who take horseback riding lessons.  So, to them, it’s just a girly thing.  Ridiculous. Then there is the fact that it is not a “school” sport. Most people don’t know what goes into making a horse jump over fences at an alarming rate of speed. That’s because it is not a sport like football, basketball, or baseball, where everyone knows it well.  Lastly, it goes back to people making themselves feel better by putting down others.  I wish that would stop.

So, horseback riding is a sport. It requires strength, coordination, courage, and stamina.

Today is Emma’s last day of school, finally. She will be a sophomore in about two hours. Please don’t make her angry.  Thank you.

Hot one in the Lehigh Valley today. Enjoy!

 

Wicka wicka wicka is the sound of a bat’s wings flapping in the night sky. This is according to the author of a horror book I once read.  It is a sound that I dread hearing. Short of death, and speaking in public, bats are my biggest fear. I don’t know where that fear comes from. Most likely something from my childhood. But that fear is real, It is the only thing that I like about winter…no bats!

So now that my fear of bats is established, let me tell you the stories of two incidents that occurred thirty years ago. My summer of bats.

First, my ex-wife and I owned a big old home on East Franklin Street in Slatington.  One morning, very early, I came out of the bathroom after a shower.  Wearing nothing, and carrying just a towel, I entered the hallway and immediately saw a giant bat flying toward me! I know it wasn’t really a giant bat but to me it was a f@#king eagle! So I quickly dodge into the bedroom and close the door behind me, leaving the bat in the hall. My wife, still in bed, asks me what’s wrong. I tell her…. it’s a b b b b bat!  She, who is not afraid of bats says …. well, we’ll have to take care of that.

I open the bedroom door, just a crack, and into the bedroom it flies!  Super! So now my mission becomes…kill the bat, kill the bat. Animal lovers may want to stop reading here.  At this point, to me, nothing exists but me and the bat. I am Captain Ahab and he is my  great white whale.  The bat, let’s call him Moby, is circling at the ceiling. I, still totally naked, start swinging at him with my towel. I miss every.. single.. time. I miss the bat…but I am hitting my wife with the towel.  She is yelling…stop, stop, you’re hitting me!.

Remember when I said nothing existed but me and the bat. Well, also not existing were the two neighbor kids, Marc and Corey, who were outside getting papers ready to deliver. They heard every word from our bedroom including my wife’s yell to stop hitting her.  They thought I was beating her up! They got their dad.

But first, back to Moby. Animal lovers spoiler alert. I killed the bat with a tennis racket.

When the dad arrived, my wife and I both explained that nothing was happening other than the assassination of Moby Dick. We were able to show him the carcass for proof.  By the way, it wasn’t an eagle it was more like a hummingbird in size.  So Dad and Corey were satisfied by our story. Marc, on the other hand, was aloof to me the few more years that we lived there.

I said that I had two bat stories but I am going to save the other one for another post.  I am a little traumatized now having shared this one story.  It is summer time and they are out there,  flying the night skies, wicka wicka wicka.  But I still have my tennis racket.

Enjoy this sunny summer weekend. But tonight, watch out for bats!!

 

 

A few decades ago I was reading a book by someone who hiked the entire Appalachian Trail. In the book, they wrote that the Lehigh Gap in Pennsylvania was by far the ugliest part of the trail.  I could  understand that sentiment then. On the one side of the gap was the Pfizer chemical plant making green pigments. On the other side of the gap was the West Plant of the New Jersey Zinc Company. The zinc smelter destroyed all vegetation on that side of Blue Mountain, the Kittatinny Ridge.   As a side note, people in Palmerton could not have grass lawns as the grass would not grow.

Yesterday I was in Lehigh Gap, about a mile north of my beloved Slatington.  Both the Pfizer plant and the zinc smelter are gone.  You would not even know they once existed.  The area is rebounding from all of the environmental damage.  Leading the charge in the recovery is the Lehigh Gap Nature Center. Their mission is to restore and maintain their over 700 acres and to bring the zinc destroyed mountainside back to life.  They are succeeding!

The Lehigh Gap Nature Center is a wonderful place!  It is located on Paint Mill Road. It is on the Lehigh River, the D & L Trail, and the Appalachian Trail.  What a prime spot of real estate! Location, location, location! The views are spectacular.

The preserve has 13 miles of trails connecting with both the Appalachian Trail and The D & L Trail.  It is a wonderful place to hike. You may even see beaver and otter and a wide variety of birds. The center itself, located in the Osprey House, features lots of information  about the area, it’s history, and it’s salvation.  It is set up for education and even has its own lab and it’s own library.  This is the only superfund site in the nation to become, instead, an environmental center. That is something for this area to be very proud of.

I encourage all of my readers to visit the Lehigh Gap Nature Center and hike its many trails.  Again, it is a wonderful place.  I will be volunteering here, starting soon, as an Information Specialist.  Come any time, not just when I am there. But, I do know where they keep the free snacks!

I just got back from a hike in the Trexler Nature Preserve. We are so lucky that General Harry Trexler and his wife had no children. Instead of giving all of his holdings to his kids, he donated much of it to Allentown and Lehigh County.  This preserve is beautiful and managed well by the county.  On a trail today, I noticed that there are information plaques for the different types of trees in the Preserve.

I came across the plaque for the Eastern Hemlock and it immediately took me back to Slatington Junior High School!  Mrs. Hunsberger’s  8th grade English Class.   “This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlocks .”  Yes, Evangeline by Longfellow. We had to memorize  a lot of this long, long poem. The line I quoted above is all I remember 53 years later.  So why did she have us memorize so much of it?  I guess to expose us to something different, to get us out of our comfort zone, and maybe to pique our interest in a new field of study.  I remember dreading the memorization back then, but today when I came across the hemlock tree it brought back a nice memory. I certainly am not worse off for having memorized Evangeline!

That got me thinking about all the things we are asked to memorize throughout our school career.  The planets, explorers, the periodic table of elements.  The names of the Great Lakes. The colors of the rainbow! Important dates of American History.  How to conjugate the verb ser in Spanish.  The order of operation of math problems.  The state capitals and the states’ largest export. The ten rules of punctuation (thank you, Mrs. Roeder). And last, but not least, the alphabet and multiplication tables. Those last two we use all the time.  Oh and there is so much more.

I guess what I am saying is that we have been asked, in our lives, to memorize a lot of stuff. Some of it stuck. Some of it didn’t. But it wasn’t all just for a test. It was to help us become well-rounded individuals that can survive, and thrive, in an ever increasingly complicated  and diverse world.

So I thank Mrs. Hunsberger and Henry Wadsworth Longellow for making my life a little more interesting, maybe not in that moment, but certainly in the long run!

I am going to try to find Evangeline this afternoon, but I am not going to memorize it!

 

 

 

A wise person once said that our cousins are our first best friends.

I come from a large family on my mom’s side and a very small family on my dad’s side. On my dad’s side I had no cousins as he was an only child. On my mom’s side I had ten cousins. My mom had two brothers and three sisters.

My cousins came in various groupings. There were the older cousins, those around the same age as my older brothers and sister. I did not know them very well. I know that one was in the Navy and I remember seeing some of his Navy memorabilia and being very impressed. Other than that, that group did not have much of an effect on my life.

The second group was four cousins who were about eight years older than I .  They are the ones I looked up to. When I was a kid they were in high school. They always seemed so cool to me. Lying around the house listening to Righteous Brothers records.  One of these cousins, when I was about eight years old, had me convinced that Slatington’s infamous Bedbug Cave was filled with fire breathing monsters. Of course I had to believe him. He was one of the cousin I looked up to. Good times. Good times.  I haven’t seen this cousin, Larry Andreas, in about forty years. A claim to fame in this group. My cousin Sharon Burke was once on Password!

I was a member of the final group of cousins. We were all within five years of each other and maybe one year were all in Slatington High School at the same time. Jim Becker was the oldest. He was both a cousin and a neighbor so I spent a lot of time with him. He was three years older and he was the one who introduced me to my first porn mags! I can also remember, when I was maybe 13, a rousing game of strip poker with him and two Dowell Street girls. Don’t worry, we never got past shoelaces!

My fondest memories are of the final two cousins, Terry and Mike Burke, one older and one younger that I am.  I remember sleepovers at their house. I remember Terry’s collection of foot high monsters like Frankenstein and the Werewolf.  My favorite memory is of Friday nights in the early 60’s. His mom and my mom would go shopping in Out Town Slatington for a few hours.  Terry and Mike and I would go in my bedroom and make believe we were the Beatles. I played air guitar as Paul. Mike played air guitar as John. Terry rocked out as Ringo on the air drums. We didn’t have a George.  We had a great time and our favorite song to air play was “From Me To You”.

But, we grow up, we move, we change.  Terry and Mike are the only ones I am in contact with and that mostly on Facebook. Jim, I haven’t seen in 48 years. I heard at one time that he was a park ranger at Delaware Water Gap, but by now must surely be retired.

It’s sad that we can’t keep relationships going throughout our lives. I suppose that does happen on occasion. But cousins are special. They are blood.  I remember my dad telling me that when he was a teen he was in love with his cousin Blanche and was devastated to find that they could not marry.

So raise a glass to cousins everywhere, our first best friends.  Maybe this rainy day is a good day to reach out.

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One of my favorite people died today. Another victim of suicide. Anthony Bourdain killed himself in France.  I’m sad. I’m heartbroken. I’m in shock.

Of course, I didn’t know him personally. I only knew his public persona. But what a persona he had! Brash, irreverent, and always questioning authority. Always standing up for the little guy, always respectful of the people he was with, always loving life.

I have read his books starting with Kitchen Confidential. I’ve watched all of his shows, Parts Unknown, No Reservations.  I always thought he should be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize because of what he was trying to teach us all.  No matter what country he was in, he taught us that people are basically the same. They want to laugh, they want to love, and they want to eat well.

This death comes on the heels of the suicide of Kate Spade. I admit that I had never heard of her before her death. But, again, her fans seemed to be equally shocked and saddened. One thing this shows us is that we really don’t know celebrities. But it also shows us that we don’t really know our friends and acquaintances either. We all, every one of us, has a public persona. But, we all hold something back. We all have our secrets that we even keep from those closest to us.  Whenever I do couples counseling, the couple will point out a couple they know that has the “perfect marriage”, the “perfect family”, the “perfect life”. I always tell  them that you have no idea what goes on behind their closed doors.

So what can we take from this? A few things.  First, we should never compare ourselves with others, because we don’t really know that other person. Second, we live in an impermanent world. We should never be surprised by anything because life is one surprise after another.  Finally, we need to be kind.  This famous quote applies “Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about, so be kind always.”

So Anthony Bourdain is gone. He leaves behind a young daughter. How sad for her.  He leaves behind millions of adoring fans. How sad for them.  He leaves behind friends in nearly every country in the world. How sad for them, too.

My Buddhist beliefs tell me that he is on his way to his next life. Karma will apply and hopefully in his next life he will have another platform to teach love, and curiosity, and respect, and passion. I hope his new life is filled with great friends, good wines, and lots of the great food he loved.

For myself, this will be a day of processing his death. What can I learn from it?  I will be outside a lot today, but tonight I am going to look for a particular episode of Parts Unknown. I think he was in Haiti. So was President Obama. They had lunch and a great conversation. A classic, just like Anthony Bourdain.

 

 

 

 

Fifty years ago today, just after midnight in a California hotel kitchen, Bobby Kennedy was shot to death. A piece of me died that day too. He was an idol of mine, a political hero. To me he represented the best that politics and government can offer to its people, particularly to its poor and disenfranchised. I know he was not perfect. I know he was known as ruthless.  I know he once ordered a wiretap on Martin Luther King Jr.

But let me stay away from politics and move toward the personal.  He was the  third of four sons of Joseph and Rose Kennedy. He was the runt of the litter of the three older sons. Ted came along much later.  Great things were expected of Joe Jr and John.  Less was expected of Bobby.  I think this not quite fitting in, these lower expectations, and the fact that he was closer to his mother than his father, all made him the man he became.

He was empowered by what he saw of the human condition. His trips to white poor Appalachia and the black poor Mississippi Delta made him realize the great disparity of wealth in our nation.  He stressed to his children the responsibility they have to this country because they were born of the privilege that the vast majority did not have.  He made helping the poor and middle class a passion. A passion that existed in him until his death in 1968.  He did all of this in spite of having lost his two older brothers, one to a bullet less than five years before his own death. He could have stayed out of the limelight, stayed safe….but, that passion!

I wonder why some people, like Bobby, can see a wrong and use everything they have to correct that wrong.  What a much better world this could be if we all did more of that.  I see the wrongs, there are so many today. My passion only extends to posting on Facebook and attending the occasional protest.  I guess I am telling myself that I need to try harder and be someone Bobby Kennedy would look up to.  Now there is a goal!

If you have time today, and are interested in learning more about Bobby Kennedy, get out your Kindle! “Bobby Kennedy” by Chris Matthews is a great read.

Enjoy your day….passionately!

 

John Mellencamp starts off his iconic hit Small Town with these lyrics “Well I was born in a small town, and I live in a small town, probably die in a small town, oh those small communities”.  He was writing about Bloomington, Indiana which has a population near 80,000.  I know everything is relative, but that hardly seems to qualify as a “small town”.

When I think of a small town, I think of the towns in Pennsylvania that range from maybe 2,000 to 10,000 people.  There are hundreds of them within a few hours of Allentown.  To me, an amazing thing about each of those communities is that they were, at one time, self containing. You could get whatever you needed in that small town and never have to leave.  In my youth, Slatington had a stationery store, a men’s clothing store, and even a hat shop!  Each community had its own movie theater. Slatington had the Arcadia. Palmerton, the Palm. Of course, they are all  gone today.

So what happened to these small towns. Why are they just a shell of their former selves?  Most of them were built around a particular industry and those industries are probably gone.  In the sixties more women joined the workforce and more families had more income and wanted to have a larger variety of things to buy than what they might find in their town.  The addition of malls and shopping centers attracted people away from the small towns.  Eventually, most families had two cars and trips away from town were much easier.  But the towns, minus the wide variety of shops and services, still exist more as bedroom communities.

Yesterday, I visited Tuscarora State Park, in Schuylkill  County,and decided to return home on a circuitous route through many of the small towns I am talking about. My trip took me through Tamaqua, Nesquehoning, Lansford, Summit Hill, Lehighton, and Slatington.  It was a nostalgia tour for sure.  But in each town I was able to remember when they were thriving and able to compare them to what they look like today.  Yes, I miss the old days.

So I guess this post is a bit of a cautionary tale. Everything has a life span and everything is constantly changing. Enjoy and cherish what you have today. It may soon be gone.