DRINKING OF ELDER MEN: Collected Essays 2009 to the Present

Suspicious Dishes at the Buffett Table

2012-02-27T06:15:00.003-05:00

As long as we're talking of people who get under my skin (re: Mitt Romney) or perhaps I should say, get my goat, since this guy has rounded up a lot goats in his life. Or at least rounded up a few bucks. He has a herd of about 37 Billion give or take a billion.

Warren Buffett sings a good song, but there is something wrong with his lyrics. Lets long at this man who spent his life bellied up to the Buffet Table of wealth.

He says he has no real need for money, he lives a modest frugal life, and he doesn't believe in inherited wealth so his kids be left enough to sit about on wealthily bottoms doing nothing, but will have to earn their own keep. It isn't right people just got lucky in the sperm lottery. He is going to give away 99% of his wealth when he dies because he looks at what he earned as a collection of Social Credit Claims. He also famously complained about paying less taxes than his employees and how unfair that was.

All very righteous statements it seems.

After all he had such a rough beginning, being the son of a Brokerage Firm owner and four-time Congressman.

Buffett is an example that if you're only goal in life is to rich, you can become rich. Now, he did get paid a salary of only $12,000 a year for the job he took at age 24. A modest sum, right, except it would be a starting salary of about $100,000 in today's money. He got almost as much in that first year as I paid for my first house in 1961. Put that $12,000 in perspective. In 1959 my starting salary was $2,808 a year and that was considered above average for a beginning wage. When I was a teenager we dreamed of making a fabulous $100 a week and really successful guys, guys who were at the top, guys who had it made, earned $10,000 a year.

He doesn't feel any guilt about doing nothing in life but chasing after more money. He says he has little use for material things and so doesn't spend a lot. (Then why didn't you have an ambition to go out and become a plumber, garbage collector or something useful like that, but not as well paid?) After all, he still lives in that modest little house he bought for $31,500. Of course, that modest house is valued at $700,000 today and I guess his $4 million home in California doesn't count. But then again, when you have $37 Billion dollars more or less $4 million is a modest sum.

But his viewpoint on consumption is this: "The way I see itis that my money represents an enormous number of claim checks on society. Itslike I have these little pieces of paper that I can turn into consumption. If Iwanted to, I could hire 10,000 people to do nothing but paint my picture everyday for the rest of my life. And the GDP would go up. But the utility of theproduct would be zilch, and I would be keeping those 10,000 people from doingAIDS research, or teaching, or nursing. I don't do that though. I don't usevery many of those claim checks. There's nothing material I want very much. AndI'm going to give virtually all of those claim checks to charity when my wifeand I die."

Well, why didn't he take that money and hire those 10,000 people to do AIDS research? Or use it to train those 10,000 as teachers and nurses and pay their salaries for the rest of his life so they can nurse the indigent or teach the downtrodden? Wouldn't that still help the GDP? Wouldn't that be a good use of those claim checks?

He does make charitable donations. For instance, he auctioned his 2001 Lincoln Town Car off on eBay to raise money for Girls, Inc. Don't know what it went for. I've given three of my cars to charity, by the way, and I don't rank on any Forbes List; I can't even afford to subscribe to Forbes magazine. Big deal, Warren.

Lets see there was also:

He auctioned a luncheon with himself and got $650,100 for charity.
He auctioned a Power Lunch with Himself and got $2,110,100 for the Glide Foundation.
And Salida Capital Corp. gave $1,680,000 to dine with him. (I bet they wanted to get some valuable advice for their "gift".)

Don't you love how the really rich people are always getting praise for the charitable contributions that cost them very little of their time and nothing out of their own pocket.

And why don't the people who can afford to pay $650,100 for lunch, just give the money to a charity without having to get something in return, even if only a Buffett?

But never fear, he is going to give 99% of his fortune to charity when he died. Why not now? Just do it. Give the 99% away now while you can bask in all the testimonial dinners and see the plaques they'll hand you. You'll still have enough left over to live your modest life style.

But when he dies he'll give the 99% away elsewhere so his children will "have enough to do what they want, but not enough to do nothing". I would love to leave my children in that position, to tell the truth, but I don't have enough to leave that they could do what they want. My kids will inherit one-third of an artificial Christmas Tree and one-third of an electric wok and they'll have to fight over the tree stand and the power cord.

He will leave behind to his heirs a meager 1% of his fortune, which is $370 Million. His three kids will have to get along on a mere $123,333,333 each. Now maybe, just maybe considering his children are all middle-aged and doing okay in their own right, that just might be enough they could kink back a bit in their later years.

Finally we have the big tax concern of the man who spent his life on his one great purpose, making money. Poor thing doesn't pay enough taxes. His statement was made in 2006, and his claim is he only paid 19% of his $48.1 million income in tax and his employees paid 33% on theirs. His employees evidently are paid well to be in that 33% bracket, so some generosity there. So his complain was he only paid $9.139 Billion in tax. Well, if you felt so bad why didn't you just give a gift to the government that would equaled with your tax that 33% rate? You can legally do that, you know?

Besides, why this discrepancy anyway? You didn't pay the 33% because you took measures to avoid paying income tax in the first place. He paid himself a salary of $100,000 a year. A nice sum, but far less than other CEO in his league. A lot of these CEOs take these modest salaries, some only take One Dollar a year. My, aren't they a generous lot? They care about the welfare of the company so much they take almost no salary. But they do take a lot of Stock Options and that kind of compensation, because then they only have to pay the capital gains tax of 15% on their income -- while their employees have to pay the full measure of their tax bracket because they are getting a salary considered earned income!

You want to pay the higher taxes, give yourself a great big salary! And don't take the allowed deductions! Then maybe you'll be happy.

And stop running about patting yourself on the back and telling everybody else to give away their money.

Mitt Gives me Fits

2012-02-25T11:20:00.000-05:00

I have always avoided writing anything political in my Blogs.For one, I don’t like politics. For two, I think it is a good way to losefriends. For three, no one seems able to discuss issues rationally. All peopledo is stick some brand on your hide and then they tell you what YOU supposedly thinkon every issue, whether you do or not. For four, I usually let anything thesewindbags of any and all parties say roll off my back blow away in the breeze.

But for some reason this Romney guy gets under my skin.

When asked recently if he thought he had the bestchance to beat Obama, he said, “I don't think if I have the best chance, Ithink I have the only chance."

Maybe its just hubris, but we already have anegomaniac in the White House we don’t need another. He says things in a stupidway that can be used against him, maybe that’s why? A man running for Presidentshould know better how to phrase his remarks. “I just love firing people…”, “Idon’t care about the poor…”, “I don’t think people want their President [payingmore taxes than he owes…”

Opponents and Press took these out of context ofwhat he meant, except the last statement where he was preparing everybody to hearjust how little he pays in taxes compared to what he makes, yet he seems toodumb to understand that is the way his remarks will get played.

Now he tells us he is the only person in the wholewide world great enough to beat Obama. This guy doesn’t even know how to fakehumility.

But he should learn or he shouldn’t give speechesin stadiums that make it look like nobody showed up to hear him. Maybe his egotold him 65,000 people would actually show up and fill the seats.

Personally, I don’t know why anyone wants to bePresident, but I really don’t know why this guy does. I can’t see where he hasany strong convictions about anything. I get the sense of a salesman sellingwhatever is hot at the moment, but ready to switch his pitch as soon as itwanes. But his faulty marketing sense tells me he doesn’t understand the markethe’s pitching too.

I think he wants to be President as a resume enhancement.

Now he is campaigning on rising both the age forreceiving Medicare and Social Security. Well, isn’t that cute. If I had a quintilliondollars stashed away in the Cayman Island and a Swiss bank Account where Icould avoid income tax maybe I wouldn’t care what age I got Social Securityeither.

To tell the truth, I think we might have all beenbetter off never having the Social Security System. We would have been betteroff knowing it was up to us to set aside for our old age and as a society tolook after each other within communities rather than ending up at the mercy ofWashington politicians. But we DO have Social Security and just about everyperson living in the U.S. today has grown up under this system. It is what itis and I think we’re stuck with it. They promised us this would be there for usand forced by law to contribute to it all our working life. I am in myseventies collecting it, but also still paying into it when I work, and thenpaying some income tax on the portion I receive.

I remind those such as Mitt, rhymes with Nitwit,that I paid into this. I made premiums as I would into any annuity promising aninvestment to provide for my old age. I am sick and tired of politicians talkingas if we are getting some kind of welfare. We are simply collecting what wepaid for. It was the politicianswho cheated and took from the fund; it wasn’t my fellow seniors or I who notpaying our premiums. We met our obligation; now the government must meet itsown.

Mitt can run out there and talk about how everybodylives longer and therefore the age of payout should be later. Mitt finds thateasy to say when he doesn’t have any worry about whether his car breaks down orthe roof leaks or he gets sick, because he has a quintillion dollars. If Ihadn’t been able to get Social Security when I did, I would have been in aworld of hurt, maybe I really would be on welfare…and homeless. Mitt doesn’thave to worry about being homeless.

If you rich politicians, which is most of them and mostof whom never did an honest days work in their lives, want to raise the agepeople can receive Social Security and Medicare, you better darn well dosomething on the other side of the equation.

You better tell those businesses out there not toterminate us old people. My friends and I talked about the fact that we don’tknow anyone – NOT A PERSON – who managed to stay with a company and retire at65. They could save a little in salary and benefits so bounced me out at age 60after 21 years.

We can’t all get elected to the Senate and leachoff the public until we die, now can we?

Many I know, including me, started working early inlife. I began working in Grade School. I’ve worked continually ever since. I continuedworking after at 60. My jobs have been physical part time labor paying justabove minimum wage. They keep laying me off because of the economy. You know, theones on the bottom go first when the CEOs sees his or her stock options tailoff. And you know at 70 it gets a little harder to get hired and a littleharder to keep the body in working shape.

So, give me somebody with some positive ideas thathelp everyone, not the typical Corporate-think of let’s cut costs by cuttingthe employee health care and wages. Give me somebody who says what he meansboth today and tomorrow, and knows how to say it correctly so it isn’tmisunderstood. And give me somebody who isn’t so rich they know knowing aboutthe real world where most of us survive.

It is so sad if Romney is the best we can come upwith.

Asta

2012-02-24T08:29:00.002-05:00

Somehow cats always know when the end has come. They will wander off and find a private place to lie down and wait for death to visit.

So it was with Asta yesterday. I had come back from the store with bread and pills. My right ankle has been ablaze with arthritis all this week, as if a welder was shooting his flame up my leg. I got some Aleve. It didn't help. I got the bread for lunch because we were out.

I sat down on the sofa and noticed Asta was lying on the edge of the carpet. I thought this odd. She doesn't usually lay on the floor. She likes the back of the furniture or the window sill.

I leaned in over her and she didn't jump up and dash away. Asta has always been the scariest of fraidy cats. She jumped if you moved too quickly and ran at the least provocation. Besides when I sat down she would usually be quick to come up behind my head and then walk down onto my upper chest.

I though, did she have a stroke? But then she got up and walked across the room and out into the dining area. But she moved slowly and she is a quick cat. Still, cats have their moods.

Later in the day I realized I hadn't seen her since. The same come evening and I asked Laurel and Lois if they had seen her. We began looking and after searching the house could not find her. I was concerned. Did she get outside somehow?

My wife thought not and I couldn't see how. Lois said she will probably turn up, she had hidden well before and then popped up.

She had gotten out before, too. A half dozen years ago our basement window broke somehow. Before I was able to put something over it, some of our cats escaped. Brad, of course, because he was always finding ways to get out. He would always stay outside a few days and come back. A couple others we were able to grab right away. Sephoroth and Asta also fled out the hole and into the night.

Brad did come back, but Sephoroth (pictured left) disappeared and we didn't know his fate. A few weeks ago a cat began appearing in our yard occasionally that looked like Sephy. Could it be that Sephoroth had been taken in by somebody back six years ago? If so, had he escaped again or been discarded or what? This cat came around about every day for a couple weeks, but would run if it saw anyone. Then one day coming back from a morning walk I saw this cat dead in the middle of Glenrock, hit by a car. It may have been Sephy and if so, then Sephoroth died this year as well.

We didn't see Asta for a month that year she got outside, and then one day she appeared in our utility room. There is a place where cats can get into the house beneath the flooring and exit into this room. I was able to grab her and bring her upstairs. She was very clinging from that time on. I think it was a trying experience for her.

She also had a problem with her mouth after that. It would hurt her sometimes and she would growl and rub at it. Still, most of the time she was fine.

Asta was a tiny cat and different from any of the others. She was a brownish color. Her ears were tufted and she would flatten her ears against her head if you stroked her. Maybe because she was small she didn't like other cats to come too close and would snarl and hiss at any who did. She was a feisty little girl.

She had been in one of the litters this feral cat kept dropping in our storage shed. She was with the group of Amber, John, Thorn and Ridge. (That is Amber, Thorn and Asta as kittens on the right.) Amber, John and Ridge all died last year, so now only Thorn remains. Thorn and Asta are 11 years old.

After Lois and I had searched last night, Laurel looked again. She found Asta curled up inside a cat condo right by the dining room entrance. I hadn't even realized this particular cat condo had an inner chamber. Laurel, who is a VetTech, knew right away she was dying. She brought her out, wrapped her in an old shirt and held her on her lap the rest of the evening.

When Laurel went to bed she fixed a place for Asta in the bathroom and put a litter box and some food beside her. When I awoke and went into the bathroom this morning she had passed away.

We will miss her. Rest in piece -- Asta, 2001- February 24, 2012.

Living and Reliving

2012-02-23T16:54:00.000-05:00

It has been a blue moon since I posted here. Some may have seen my last subject, "Quitting the Writing game" and decided I did indeed quit writing. Maybe some are happy with that idea. Forget about it. I have been writing and posting everyday, sometimes several times a day.

I have been writing my autobiography.

I call it, Impressions of My Life: Autobiography of a Recherché Poet.

Why such an odd title? When I think back over my existence my memory often lets me down or things come back somewhat as if in a dream. The mind begins to wander through a fog of days and months and years after a while. I can't always pin something down to an exact time. Sometimes I am not sure of the Five Ws, the who, what, where, why and when, let alone the how.

What I write is what I recall and this may only be impressions of what happened. I may see the events and the facts differently than others do or did. I only know what these eyes have seen or I've been told.

The Recherché Poet? I originally subtitled it "Autobiography of a Minor Poet," but my friend, the same one who pushed me to write my life, though it made me sound like I was a child poet. I meant it only as a poet who had a limited following and publishing history. He suggested changing it to "Insignificant Poet". Well, my ego vetoed that! I may not be the Poet Laureate of Delaware or anything, but I do not think of my poems as insignificant.

He then suggested, "Unknown Poet," but I am not completely unknown. Therefore, I choose Recherché Poet as covering most of the bases. It means, rare, exotic or obscure. You may take your pick.

So, if I have been doing this opus daily, why aren't readers of this or my other Blogs seeing it? That too was a choice I made. I am doing it on a private Blog. The Blog is not completely closed to readers, but it isn't being Googled about the Internet or advertised.

There are a couple of reasons. When I did decide I would do this, I also decided I would try to be as honest as someone can when spilling the beans about themselves. The first half of my life was not exactly PG rated. As Richard Nixon (a fourth cousin, by the way) famously said, "I am not a crook,," but I have not been a paragon of virtue either. I have broken my share of the Ten Commandments and partaken of the Seven Deadly Sins. My lief is not always pretty reading.

Now, if everyone would be completely honest, all of you could have written that last paragraph about yourselves.

A second reason is no one lives in a vacuum alone. People weave in and out of our lives. Life is a great tapestry of relationship, good and bad. If I am honest about my life, I must be honest about my view of those who shared in its making. Sometimes this is not flattering. Sometimes it is quite critical. I have no wish to offend anyone.

Someday when I get old (Ha!) and many others have passed on, I may open it up to general readership. For now all and sundry who to my knowledge have secrets or sins are safe.

Writing one's life may seem an ego trip, but I recommend it. It is very helpful in learning and understanding yourself.

Quiting the Writing Game

2012-02-06T10:01:00.000-05:00

Okay, don't anybody gets too excited that they will not have to read anything by me again. I said, " The Writing Game" not writing.

It is easier for an alcoholic to give up drinking than a writer to quit writing. Writing isn't like an addiction; it's more an incurable disease. One doesn't give it up anymore than someone gives up cancer.

I'll continue writing until they pull the keyboard from under my cold, dead fingers. I've been writing professionally for 60 years if you count the newspaper Stuart Meisel and I wrote and sold in the school hallway in 1952-53. It's been 55 years if you count it from the song "My Little White Lamb" my first New York published piece. I have been published somewhere or other in every decade since.

I have written almost every day since I was 12 years old. It may turn into gibberish if I go senile, but someone would have to shoot me to stop me. (Now I fully understand some people may say I already write gibberish. To them I say, "@&#*!" Just typing gibberish, translate at your own risk.)

The Writing Game has very little to do with actual writing. The Writing Game is what you play when fame and fortune is what you think you want. It is the desperate rules you follow to be published and see your name in print. It is the conventions you cow tow to in order to impress an editor. In other words it is pandering to please someone else's dictates of what writing is, but it is not writing.

In every art form their exist a coterie of elitist snobs who claim privy to what is and isn't proper. Well, there is another kind of privy and that is where their opinions really belong. If we depended on the considerations of these mutually declared haut monde of culture we probably would not have the great variety of art we enjoy. Like most elitist these person's main purpose is to keep things to themselves, for to share is anti-privileged They tend to cling to the last best thing or speak mumbo-jumbo to declare something unfathomable as insightful. We must remember these people generally have stood in the doorway of evolving art for centuries and one wonders how many artists they have killed figuratively speaking over the years.

One must remember Van Gogh sold only one painting in his lifetime. Kathryn Stockett was rejected by 60 agents before one agreed to market her novel The Help. We probably would never have heard of such people as Beethoven, Jack Kerouac, William Faulkner, James Joyce or Jackson Pollack if those elitist who think they uphold the pillars of the media had their way during their times.

Now don't misunderstand, I am not trying to place myself on the level of those I just mentioned. As a teenager I was content to dream of being a hack writer of horror stories. Basically I achieved that and had some success as a pulp writer. If anything I have written rises about that level, then fine. I don't care. I've quit the writing game.

I have seen my name in print many times and it is no big deal. I am tired of changing things to suit some editor or to avoid upsetting the politically correct applecart. We have the internet now and the freedom to write what we would write to the best we can write it. If some read my words and enjoy them or think about them that is enough. If people read my words and dislike what I wrote then they are totally free never to read my words again. That won't stop my words.

What finally persuaded me to quit the writing game was some criticism of a story I wrote. It was made by a college professor, someone very much in a position to poison young mind. Her criticism was not of my style or content per se. Her statement was, "You didn't describe if your character was white or black, American or Canadian or whatever nationality or race; therefore, I could not relate to your character."

Is this what we have come to? This kind of bigoted need of superficialities to understand a story? These things did not matter in my story. The main character could have just as easily been of Asian ethnicity. The main character could have been a black man or a Hispanic woman, these random accidents of birth had no bearing on the story. It was about a human being dealing with life. If the color of her skin had a bearing on the plot I would have put it in there.

I thought, "Gimme a break! Are you kidding me?"

No, from now on I write what I write. Read it for what it is worth. If you like it, come back and read some more. If you don't like it, then go away. That is the freedom we all have now.

This is not a Political Post.

2012-02-01T20:01:00.000-05:00

My grandmother had an old country expression, “That mandon’t have a lick of sense.” Now we all have slips of the tongue or say thingswithout thinking, but if you are running for President and making publicstatements you need to have a good editor up in your brain.

Mitt Romney looks good. He cleans up real nice, don’t he? Hasthat little touch of gray at the temples, his tie on straight. He “looksPresidential” as they say. But he don’t talk good. (Yes, it is ungrammatical,but I’m not running for anything.) Romney is leading in the GOP circus rightnow, but his handlers better get him into Poli-Speak College for the course 101 - How Not to Give Your OpponentsNegative Sound Bites.

This wouldn’t make no never mind (another old countrysaying) if we had an honest and decent Press in this country. We don’t. We havea bunch of vultures more interested in the gotcha moment than reporting fact orexplaining anything fairly and at depth. If a candidate can’t grasp the need forcaution when speaking to the Press, he is a fool.

Last week in the debates Romney made two comments about histax statements that showed he is out of touch with the everyday working personin this country.

First he stated his 2010 tax return would “show he paid allthe taxes he was obligated to pay.”Well, so do I. Of course, to do otherwise would be illegal and the IRS would becoming after me. I mean, what the heck is that? It sounds like every politicianor business executive ever charged with cooking the books or fraudulentactivity. “I have done nothing illegal. It was all within the law as it iswritten.”

In other words it sounds as if he is exploiting a bunch ofloopholes to avoid paying tax. It may be legal, but it doesn’t look good andthe average guy can’t do it. You know, like having a secret Swiss bank accountor money stashed in the Cayman Islands.

Not realizing how such a statement would play in the press,he went up and compounded it with this quote, “I don't think the voterswant a president who pays more than he owes." That quote just triggerspeople to be suspicious and look for something hidden.

Well, I suppose we don’t want anyone payingmore than they owe, but why in the world would you make such a remark? It justreinforced the idea you pulled some shenanigans to avoid paying tax. It also indicates a person knowing hisreturns are going to show something he wants to prepare people for because heknows it will look like he got off cheap. It also says he is out of touch with the common man. It ranksup there with Marie Antoinette's "Let them eat cake," when peoplewere asking for bread. As an old Credence Clearwater song goes, "I ain'tno privileged son." Mitt is a privileged son.

Now a week later he opens his mouth and stupidityspews out. You would think he would have learned how the press, TV comedians and hisopposition work from his previously and famously misquoted, “I love firingpeople.” You may be saying a perfectly reasonable and logical thing, but if youdon’t frame it correctly, no one will hear the real message.

His “I love firing people” was only part of thestatement, because he was referring to getting rid of service people who failedto provide the service promised. We all have done this at times. I switchedphone companies some years back for service issues. It was the correct thing todo. But it was stupid to frame this very sensible and commonsense practiceusing the words “love” and “firing”. And the predictable happened. Only that part of his comment was used ina totally different way than he used it to make him look like Ebenezer Scroogerubbing his hands in glee because he loved firing poor Bob Cratchet. Unfair,untrue, but today’s reality.

Yet he made the same structural gaff again. Heexplained how he was concentrating on the vast majority of Americans,strengthening the middle class, an absolute necessity if we are to bring thiscountry back to economic strength. He also said he would help fix any “holes inthe safety net” for the poor.

Unfortunately he again framed his statementstupidly. He began it by saying, “I don’t care about the poor…” That is all thereporter heard, not what he really said. Now that bad phrasing is going to showup on the lips of Colbert and Leno and Letterman and Fallon. Now those out ofcontext words will become a nice sound bite for his opponents’ negative ads. Ican hear the spots now: “Here is what Mitt Romney says, “I love firing people…Idon’t care about the poor…”

Now this is not a political post. I am neitherendorsing or non-endorsing any candidate of either party. I am angry that thepress in this country does not bother to explain and illuminate rather thanglory in “gotchas” and even will distort things in order to create one. But itis what it is and the fact Romney can’t seem to get a grasp on that factbothers me. He manages to get his ties properly tied, but he needs to find away to tie down his tongue.

Of course this constant distortion by the Press andothers of what people actually say is what keeps good people from running foroffice. And look what we get stuck with.

You Need Your Knees

2012-01-31T08:09:00.003-05:00

You take a lot for granted about your body when everything is working as it should. You forget that the whole is the sum of its parts. When a part isn't doing what it should it just might bring the machine to a halt.

My left knee just about brought this old contrapion called me to a stop. I wrote about the pain a week ago, so consider this a progress report.

Knees are ugly things, at least on me they are. They are bumpy and scared, and of course a popular gathering place for my psoriasis. I don't really have to look at them all that much. They are down there someplace kind of in a blind spot. I barely consider them, except on those occasions with Mr. Arthur Itis comes by to visit those joints. But as I last reported his cousin Mr. Bur S. Itis moved in this month, lock stock, balloon and red-hot poker.

There's what he looked like back on the 23rd in the right photo.

He blew up enough to take out some of the wrinkles, but who cares if their knees are smooth? Fact was it hurt like blazes and I couldn't bend my leg, not a wit, not an inch.

It is a real inconvenience when the knee won't bend, especially with the pain. I couldn't easily get in the car. I had to push my self up high and half over the passenger seat to slide that left foot up and in. Once I got the leg and foot in the car it was agony driving even short distances because I couldn't stretch it straight out and that little bend I forced upon it keep burning at me all the way.

Getting dressed was another interesting maneuver. You can't bend the thing and you can't hardly lift your foot without Mr. Bur S. Itis shooting a dart down your shin. I had to devise a way to manage.

I would have to hold my underwear so the leg hole was an open target. Lift my left leg a inch while gritting my teeth and then wave the shorts back and forth until I lassoed the toes. After that I gently tugged them over the foot and then slipped in the right foot, because that leg I could bend and pulled them up. Somewhat the same with trousers, except they were too long and bulky to wave at my toes. I would place the left side of them pretty much down on the floor, then ease my foot up on them hoping to get into the top of the leg. Now again an easing up inch by inch until my foot peeked through the other side. Then dip down the right side and slip in the right foot and pull into place.

I would put my right shoe on first. I would place my left shoe on the floor and again force my left leg and foot off the found and over the back into the opening. After than I just had to press until my foot was inside, which usually broke down the back of my shoe under my heel. It wasn't easy getting that leather out and back where it should be either. A lot of pushing with my other foot.

Of course for the first week I couldn't tie that shoe. My wife had to do it for me. "Thank you, mommy. Someday I'll learn to do it myself!"

Now I didn't mention something else. Something goes on between the pants and the shoe called a sock. I figured out how to get the pants on Larry and the shoe over my toes, but I found no way to get the sock on. Again, I had to ask my wife to do it.

So I was dressed with no where to go, because I couldn't blasted walk. I was more or less a paperweight for a week. Then it began to improve a bit. I could bend it a teeny tiny bit.

Here is how I measured progress. "Mommy, mommy, I tied my shoe all by myself today!" Yes, it bent just enough I could lean over while standing up, just grasp my shoelace ends and by gritting my teeth manage a reasonable bow knot. I still couldn't get my sock anywhere near my toes though. I was still dragging myself into the car and trying to hide the pain of driving. I still couldn't sleep but in one position at night, assuming I could get to sleep at all.

But a couple days ago the pain easied and the knee bent a little more. I could actually change how I lay at night and sleep. It was getting easier to dress and to get in the car. Then another day and a bit more bend and bit less swelling. Now I had almost no pain, unless I forgot myself and bent my leg too far. It wasn't too far to too far, either.

I felt my leg was about 85% back to normal. I felt no discomfort now driving, although I still had to be careful getting into a vehicle. And then I actually managed to put my sock on myself. It wasn't all that easy, but I can do it.

I still couldn't cross my legs, but I was walking almost like a human being again.

Now today both my knees are looking more like their good old wrinkled up ugly selves. This morning they almost look like twins, although you can still see a little swelling in the left.

However, I can't catch a break. I woke up at two o'clock this morning from pain. It wasn't my left knee.

It seems Mr. Arthur Itis took up residence in the apartment below. My ankle is killing me and I'm back to an old man's shuffle.

Like a kind of Sanctuary

2012-01-28T13:28:00.000-05:00

I was baptized as a baby in the Grove Methodist Episcopal Church, but I never attended any services there. When I was a preschooler, my mother took me to St. James Episcopalian Church on East Lancaster Avenue in Downingtown one Easter. We didn't attend any service there either from what I remember. She took me there for the Easter Egg hunt and rides in a pony cart.

Sometime about third grade my folks made me go to Sunday School at the Downingtown Methodist Church on Creek Road. They must have figured I was old enough to walk the length of our street to attend, but they sure didn't go to church. I think they might have shown up on Easter and Christmas, maybe. They did come one Sunday when I played a tree in some kind of pageant.

I didn't much cotton to going myself, but I wasn't asked.

The place I came to accept as my church, or my sanctuary, was the building pictured. This was the Downingtown Public Library and it contained magic. It held books, lots and lots of books.

It was and is a lovely building, still there and still a library as far as I know. It sat directly across from the home of one of my best friends, Staurt Meisel. It was built of stone over which ivy crawled from the yard to the roof. Fronting the yard was a stone wall. I use to walk atop this wall and feel so daring, it seemed high and dangerous. When I went back as an adult I was embarrassed to think its two foot high cliffs frightened me.

The building has a history. it was built to house Dr. William A. Todd and his new wife, Ann Downing. It was constructed in 1800 and served as both Dr. Todd's home and office.
In 1839 the house became the Mary B. Thomas Boarding School. Its use changed again by the early 1900s when the Women's Club of Downingtown made it their clubhouse, but in 1917 the Women's Club had to turn it over to the American Red Cross. The Red Cross utilized the facilities during the remainder of World War I to make surgical bandages for the troops. Eventually after the end of the war it became the Library.

The stacks were downstairs. I do not know what was upstairs, I was never up those steps. The Children's Library was the room to your right as you entered. The Librarian sat in the large room on the left behind a large desk just a few feet inside the door. Shelves surrounded her floor to ceiling. To her left was a deeper section full of rack after rack. It was darker back in that area.

When I first took out a Member Card I was not quite ten years old. I was related to the Children's Library. The big room was off-limits. The librarian was an older woman. I remember her as frail in appearance and something of the stereotype of the spinster librarian. She was strict and scared me a little. Still, I came often and took the limit of books out at a time and read them all within the week. I think I read all the Hardy Boys, several books about animals, both short stories and novels, a whole series of science fiction and all of Robert Louis Stevenson's best know works except one.

Oh, how I wanted to read that forbidden work as well as more Edgar Allan Poe.

About the time I went from Grade School to Junior High the librarian either retired or died. She was replaced by a young woman and that young woman opened up the world to me. She was so nice. I had read my way through the Children's Library, or as much of it as I cared to. I was not yet old enough, but one night she agreed to allow me to borrow books but the big room. Oddly enough, Stevenson's book was not the first I withdrew from the Big Room. The first book I read out of the Downingtown Adult Library Room was a play in verse by Edmond Rostand called Cyrano de Bergerac. I guess I was a weird kid.

After I read that I got my Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde at long last.

I spent many an evening at the library and since I was often the only one who came in, the Librarian and I began having conversations. I told her I had decided to be a writer and she asked to see some of what I wrote. She made comments and she allowed me to use the library typewriter to tap out my stories and poems in a more "professional" manner.

If I was engaged to reading books before I ever walked in the doors of the Downingtown Public Library, I was married to books ever after. I am also eternally grateful to that young Librarian for mentoring this poor skinny lad when no one else cared a wit about his peculiar idea of being a writer.

Pain

2012-01-25T10:13:00.000-05:00

Life in recent times is a four-letter word spelled P-A-I-N. This is the cost of carrying this body none to gently through the years. Age has a way of reminding me that the smooth and sturdy container I gave no concern to in youth is now dinged and dented, wrinkled and wrecked.

In my younger days I was a fast runner, but you can't outrun age. Your sprints and dashes gradually become rapid walks and then you find that four miles an hour pace has slipped by a mile. All those old slowpokes you use to breeze pass on the trails are now going by you. You don't outrace that old geezer with the scythe. He was out of sight and out of mind once upon a time, but now I can catch a glimpse of him over my shoulder.

I suppose at this point I should put up that warning that this blog may contain images some would find disturbing.

I am referring to my knees.

Old Man Time doesn't like knees and elbows. He really warps the skin on those body parts. I have seen elephants with smoother skin than what my kneecaps have become.

In fact, I use to have nice looking legs and as these first pictures from the past summer attest, not so long ago I still had human-looking limbs, but this week not so much. Now admittedly arthritis has played a role in rearranging my landscape. My fingers have developed a curve and I can no longer completely close my hands into a fist. My feet have especially suffered the slings and arrows of uric acid overindulging in their joints like some mean drunk always spoiling for a fight. There are days few and far between I wake up pain free. Mostly it is a twinge in a toe or a stinging about the ankle that is barely noticeable in the daily activity of my life. Sometimes it is a flare-up of angry bees with red-hot fireplace pokers for stingers doing battle here or there. Never have these bouts prevented me from working and very seldom deterred me from my daily walk through the forest, even though such pain never rests, even when you do, and it bites you when touched, latching on like a Pit Bull having roid rage. I have a high pain threshold. I can deal with Mr. Arthritic Pit Bull.

But that Old Man Time hit me low this week. I was thinking perhaps tendonitis, but it looks more and more to me like bursitis, his second cousin. I've had a couple bursitis attacks on my elbows. I was a bit self-conscious about my big freak elbow, but after a couple weeks it went back to normal. It didn't much bother me unless I leaned on my arm or brushed against something. This knee thing is a bit more obtrusive. I was wondering if I could get on some weirdo TV show and make a few bucks by claiming I had a grapefruit implanted in my knee.

My daughter and I visited the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia last week, maybe I picked it up there. My knee certainly looks like an exhibit you'd find in that place. Over in this display we have a man with balloon leg! Admittedly my right kneecap ain't no beauty contest winner either, but at least it has some shape to it. My legs look like the before and after pictures of a participant on The Biggest Loser. Besides the pain, I really can't bend the blasted thing. You should see me try to put my pants on (well, maybe you shouldn't) or my shoe and sock. I haven't even been able to tie my own left shoe, although I did manage to do just that this morning. I felt the same sense of accomplishment as I did as a toddler first mastering such a feat. Oh, Larry tied his shoe all by himself, he gets a gold star!

I am doing all one can for such an inflation, keeping off my feet, resting, popping Ibuprofen and getting a healthily understanding why some people get hooked on pain pills. I did notice in this last picture I took this morning that the swelling has decreased ever so slightly. Hopefully in another week I can snap a portrait of matching kneecaps.

It does have me wondering how my dad stands it. I am going stir crazy because I can't do much physically around the house. It is a major task getting in and out of the car. I have to put in my right leg, then push this hulk of body up almost over into the passenger side to drag my left foot into place. But at least I am hobbling about. I took out the trash, took the barrel down to the curve yesterday. I can feed the cats and feed the birds and fetch the newspaper. I also have my writing, which I can sit at the computer to type and it is my lifetime love. Yet my dad can't do anything. He can't go out and get the paper or the mail. He was a long distance trucker until he was 75, then a school bus driver into his late eighties. Driving was his love and passion, but he isn't allow to do that anymore. It pains my knee to drive, but I can do it.

Old Man Time is a mean son of a goat!

Anger at How They Pick Your Pockets

2012-01-06T04:20:00.001-05:00

Now where were we? Ah yes, the Little Woman had accidentally overdraw one of our bank accounts resulting in a $37 dollar fee of 131% on $28.

(To understand how this happened go to my previous post, "Anger from One Year to the Next".)

We do not keep much money in this particular account. There is a large deposit on the First of each month (more about that to come) and by the last week of the month little remains. It's a special purpose account. So there was only $8 remaining when my wife pulled out the wrong debit card to pay a $36 purchase (prescriptions),

I asked a question. Why did the bank allow this overdraft to happen?

Obviously when the card was swiped the computer noted there were insufficient funds and one would expect the transaction to be denied. Isn't that what you have always been told about a debit card? You had to have money in your account for it to be used?

One of the dirty little secrets, among many, is the banks encourage overdrafts. This is one of their most profitable services. This is not what they tell you, of course.

They will give you three reasons to justify this usury interest rate, the overdraft fee.

1. They don't want you to be inconvenienced by rejecting a transaction over such a low sum. Thus, you are paying for not being embarrassed by public rejection. They are doing it for you!

2. Overdrafts cost the bank a lot of money.

3. They impose the fee to encourage customers to be more financially responsible.

They leave out the fourth and most important reason: it's easy and lucrative revenue for the bank. The other three reasons are basically bogus. Only Reason Number 2 has any iota to truth to it, but even that is distorted from reality and should not be considered a valid reason for these high fees.

What kinds of overdrafts do we have? We have accidental ones, such as my wife using the wrong bank card or someone thinks they have a higher balance than they have. It is difficult in these times to sometimes know your balance if you have a joint account. You take some cash from an ATM and mean time your joint partner is buying a new pair of shoes unaware of your withdrawal and voila, accidental overdraft.

We have the knowing overdraft for an emergency situation. This is where the person knows they don't have enough in the account to cover a transaction, but are willing to absorb a fee for a perceived necessity. "If I don't take twenty dollars out of the bank today, my children will have nothing to eat tonight." The person knows money will be in the account in a day or so to cover both what they took out and the greedy fee.

These are overdrafts made by basically honest persons who are good customers of the bank. The bank knows they will get that money back and their fee. If the bank thought otherwise, these people would NOT have been able to overdraw.

That's another of the dirty little secrets, you are coded. As a new customer you may be coded 1 and this tells the system to allow up to a $50 overdraft. This will change over time as you build a reputation and profile with the bank. Each code will bring a higher allowance of overdraft, maybe as much as $200, maybe more if you are wealthy. (I know of cases of wealthy people having no limits and even when they overdrew their account by thousands of dollars paid no fees. You will find in most situations if you are rich enough to afford the fees, you never are charged any.) Naturally, if you become known as a risk or have a very minimal average balance, you may be coded down to a zero and no overdraft allowed.

So there goes Reason Number 3, because if they really wanted to encourage you to be financially responsible, they wouldn't allow you to overdraw at all. But then they wouldn't be able to charge you a fat fee and make money.

And let's forget Reason Number 1, that's just PR. They couldn't care less about you being embarrassed. It's a convenience all right; a convenient way for them to make more money.

What about Reason Number 2, overdrafts cost the bank? It may cost them interest on money borrowed overnight at the Fed Fund Rate of interest. The current Fed Fund Rate is .25%. That is the annualized rate. Banks generally borrow overnight, just as we basically borrowed $28 overnight. So the bank paid a use fee of .000007% (rounded up) for a total cost of $0.00019. We paid a use fee of $37 at a rate of 48,180% annualized. See how they turned a microscopic lost into a big fat profit?

"How about processing costs caused by an overdraft?" you ask.

First of all, there is no direct cost caused by the overdraft, except that minuscule interest rate. The bigger extra cost was having an OverDraft Unit to prepare those notices mailed to the miscreants and the postage to send it. I don't know how big those units are these days. Most of the notice preparation and mailing is probably pretty much automated by now. The costs are a nanosecond of computer time, a bit of paper and postage; and the postage is probably the highest expense. Does this add up to anywhere near $37? I rather think not. Maybe a buck-thirty-seven.

However, there is a legitimate cost from overdrafts of a higher nature. This doesn't come because of those accidental overdrafts or the deliberate emergency of the moment ones. No, there is a third kind of overdraft, theft.

Yeah, there are people who overdraw an account with no intension of ever making it good. They not only aren't going to make a deposit to cover the overdraft, they aren't going to pay the fee either. Now some of these thieves know how to milk the system for all its worth. (They would probably make valuable advisers working for the bank actually. They think alike when it comes to maximizing undeserved profit.) They will make overdrafts here, there and everywhere in a short period of time before the previous overdrafts are noted and their withdrawing spree ended. With the speed of today's systems, though, the banks have probably cut down on this.

But these thieves have nothing to do with our little miscues and small overdrafts. Those people are not going to be encouraged to be more financially responsible. And they can cost the bank a hunk of change, but you and I shouldn't be punished for this. Higher overdraft fees won't stop these crooks.

I am not against the banks charging a reasonable fee for an overdraft. We are using their funds in what could be called a small, temporary loan. When I initially began in banking (40 plus years ago) such fees were kind of reasonable. Our overdraft fee was $10. If you were over from one cent to $9.99 you were not charged. We did not charge anything if under the fee amount. From $10 to $19.99 you were charged half the fee, $5.00 and $20 or above you paid the full fee. Given the minimal cost to banks when the average depositor overdraws this would still seem a reasonably excessive profit for the bank.

However, I would be inclined to say they should be restricted to charging the same rate as their small personal loans on overdrafts. I see that rate is somewhere around 15% currently. That would mean for my wife's little one day loan of $28, I would have paid a fee of one and one-tenth cent. Bank still made a profit, and if the overdraft remained another day, then another one and one-tenth cent. Okay, I can be reasonable. Let them charge a minimum fee, but no more than $12. $12 would be equivalent to a small personal loan of $1,000 for a month (31 days) at 15% annual interest. They still make a huge profit.

But banks shouldn't be living off the backs of honest people making small overdrafts, because every time they want to raise their bottom line, they raise the overdraft fee while they continue to encourage this behavior. As I stated earlier, if they truly wished to stop this behavior, they would allow no overdraft, which they do with some riskier people, so it is possible.

But that overdraft fee, despite how it sounds, was not the true source of my anger. My anger came from that combined with the same bank depositing my pension late. This is why I have an account there to begin with, my monthly pension payment is deposited there and then I have specific payments dedicated to that account monthly, which is why it shrinks almost to nothing by month end just before another infusion of my pension.

My pension check is due on the first of every month. Now usually if the first falls on a weekend, they deposit it on the Friday before. However, the first of January fell on both a Sunday and a holiday and the holiday extended through Monday and they didn't deposit my pension until Tuesday. I guess because I get a yearly pension they have to keep that amount isolated to each calendar year, but still, make it on the due date. If I am late paying something on the due date, I get charged a late fee, usually as outrageous as the overdraft fee. Not having my pension on the First caused me untold worry and aggregation and inconvenience. I am not a well-off guy, I depend on deposits being there when they should be. Not being there could cause me to make a late payment on something and incur more bloated fees.

There is no reason why it could not have been done automatically on a Sunday. They would have put a charge to my account on Sunday if I incurred one. They cancelled an automatic payment I had setup for the Second, even though that was a holiday, so why not make my deposit.

What I should do is bill the bank a $37 late fee. Fair is fair.

Anger From One Year to the Next

2012-01-05T07:02:00.000-05:00

I am not a person easily angered. It usually takes a lot. Nor do I stay angry long. On those occasions in my life when I have reached a boiling point I usually let off steam by throwing something, generally what is in easy reach. I don't throw it at anyone. I just throw it. My anger goes away then like a cold when the fever breaks. I throw it, I feel better immediately and I fairly quickly cool down.

Then I feel bad because I probably broke something of mine I didn't want to break.

These instances occur, thankfully, very, very infrequently.

It's also something those knowing we well are happy about. They know my anger is rare, comes quickly and goes away just as quick. I am not someone whose anger will seethe and continue for hours or days. So this is probably the exception that proves the rule.

I became angered prior to New Year's Eve and it has not gone away. I am still angry. Perhaps it is because I didn't throw anything and it is too late for that now. And I am not angry at one thing, either, but several things.

The first thing that angered me was my wife overdrew our account at one bank. No, I wasn't angry at my wife. I was upset because I figured we'd get charged a fee and I was unhappy because we haven't had an overdraft on our accounts for at least a decade. But I wasn't angry at anyone or anything yet.

My wife went to have her prescriptions filled and she used the wrong card in paying. It had been an honest mistake. We have accounts at two banks. Unfortunately the debit cards of both are green and look similar. She thought she was using the bank card of the account we had money in. It wasn't and this resulted in a $28 overdraft.

I check my accounts online regularly. I was shocked to see an overdrawn account. I did not see any fee charged yet, however, and I went immediately to that bank and deposited $40 dollars. My receipt then showed us having a positive balance, not much, but positive nonetheless.

Thus the next morning I am doubly surprised when I check my account and see it overdrawn $25. Why am I doubly surprised? Not so much by the fact this was caused by the charging of an overdraft fee as the fact my pension check was not deposited as expected. This is when my anger began.

Definition of Usury: the illegal action or practice of lending money atunreasonably high rates of interest.

It would seem that an interest rate of 132% for a one day "loan" is a high rate of interest. Of course there is that phrase in the definition: "the illegal action or practice". Certainly 132% is a high rate, but is it actually legal?

Definition of a Loan Shark: A person or entity that chargesborrowers interest above an established legal rate. Depending onwhere a person lives, lenders typically cannot charge more than 60%interest per annum. A loan shark, then, would be someone who illegallycharged interest over the state's legal limit, which could range upto, or even over, 100%.

So, 132% is more than 60%, but the definition says per annum. This 132% I was charged was daily, actually less than a full 24 hours before I deposited the $40. That is an annual rate of 48,180%, which would make any loan shark drool with envy.

Now I know it would not become 48,180%. If I didn't deposit to my account for two days or a week or a month, it would remain at 132% If I waited a year, although they would probably have closed my account by then, it would still be 131%, but still a lot more than 60% per annum!

Do I think this is fair and right? No, but I will explain why in my next post. I'll give you a partial reason, why did the bank allow her to overdraw? Why didn't they reject the purchase? I'll tell you next time.

Meanwhile, I leave you with this:

What’sthe difference between Congressmen and manure?

Withmanure you can spread it across a field and it will yield worthwhile crops.

Whilecongressmen are full of it, all they produce is crap.

(The photograph of Congress in session taken by the author, 2011.)

My Happy New Years 2012 Steve Jobs Intensity Portrait

2012-01-01T10:52:00.000-05:00

A Nice Quiet Country Christmas Morning

2011-12-25T16:43:00.000-05:00

We all know Christmas can get hectic. So what better than a nice quiet walk in the country to escape all the voice of our more urban environment?

Thus this December 25, 2011 about 8:00 you found me ambling along the Brandywine enjoying the silence of the forest.

Yeah, right, anyone who believes it is quiet in the woods must have grown up and lived all their life in the city.

In the city you might have honking car horns; in nature you have geese.

(I suggest you scroll down and turn off my music player before viewing the video.)

The Great Blue Christmas Heron Takes Flight

2011-12-25T16:37:00.000-05:00

There are Great Blue Herons living in our vicinity. Very large birds that are quite graceful in flight. There is one standing on the downed branches in this photo to the left, although a bit hard to see.

Below is a video shot early this Christmas morning 2011 of one taking flight.

Merry Christmas to All: Second Greatest Event

2011-12-25T11:22:00.000-05:00

I wish you all a very Merry Christmas 2011.

I suggest you scroll down and turn off my music player.

Now if Christmas is the Second Greatest event, what must be the first?

No, not my birthday, although that's in the Top Ten somewhere.

I'll give a hint. We wouldn't have had the first, if we hadn't had the second, so the second came before the first.

Lonely Months: A film

2011-12-14T16:20:00.000-05:00

I would suggest scrolling down and turning off my music player before viewing the video.

All photographs were taken by the author on December 11, 2011 in Brandywine Creek State Park.

Streets that Bind -- Washington Avenue

2011-12-06T14:21:00.001-05:00

From the time I was born until I married there were seven addresses in five townships; from my marriage to the present, eleven in eight places. These 18 addresses may be even more remarkable considering I've been in this house for the last 30 years and here is where I think of as home.

But if one asked about my boyhood home, I think of Washington Avenue. I moved there three times, twice to the same address. I lived on that street for 13 of my first 15 years.

It wasn't the longest street in the world, although it seemed so when, as a child, I walked it. It ran probably less than a half-mile end to end. It ran one block east of my own block, but I seldom had reason to go that way. It ran two long blocks to the west of mine and at the end of these, just before the creek, were my church and the movie theater. A half block off Brandywine Avenue also called Creek Road, at 120 Washington, was an apartment building where my life-long best friend lived when I first met him. (I've told the story of our meeting in "The Kid Met Him in the Funny Pages".)

On the left is 120 Washington as it looks today (actually not much different from then) and my not quite yet best friend sitting in the window of his apartment there.

Gee, he was kind of cute back in those days.

I knew someone else that lived in those apartments during those early years, a blond girl. Her name was Mary Jane and I had a crush on her through most of my elementary grades right into junior high school, although I never acted on my feeling for her and asked her out. I was friends with her and she came to my birthday parties.

We were eight years old in this photo and you won't find any other pictures of me getting quite so chummy with a girl that early on in my life. Now it is true I kissed a girl named Michele around this same time period (and got in a bit of trouble because of it) but I never had any true feelings for Michele as I secretly did for Mary Jane.

I suppose I should explain how I came to be a Washington Avenuer.

The first time we moved there I was six months old and it was to be my third home. My first had been in Modena and my second at Whitford. I've never really known why we moved to 424 Washington in town that Christmas season. We moved there with my maternal grandparents, who were the actual renters of the house (they never owned it). My parents had moved in with them at Whitford earlier in the year from Modena, my father's boyhood hometown. (Photo left: my mom holding me before the porch of 424.)

I know why my parents moved from the Modena apartment (bedbug infestation combined with financial need) to Whitford; but why the move shortly after to town I don't know. The "big house", as they called it, in Whitford appears to be large enough to accommodate two families, in fact, was probably larger than 424 Washington Avenue.

The Whitford house was where my mother grew up, so it had been my grandparents long time abode and was near to my grandfather's own family roots.

They didn't own that place either. It was actually part of the George Thomas III estate. The Thomas family was one of the original settlers of the area and one of its most prominent families. I do not know if George Thomas choose to end the renting of this property or if the move was somehow related to the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Perhaps the beginning of the war in which my father would serve for several years prompted changes. (Photo right: my mom as a child at Whitford.)

We all lived in that house throughout the war years. I made two close friends on the block, Iva and Bill. Iva was to remain a friend for always, but Bill moved away about the time I moved to 424 the second time and eventually we lost contact.

Why a second time? Why did we even move away from 424 a first time? Easy to explain, the war ended.

My dad had been in the South Pacific most of those first years at that 424 address. He got his discharge a couple years after the war ended and returned home in 1947. He got his first job as a long distance truck driver that fall, driving milk tankers for a man named Hines. A friend of his had told dad the company was hiring, but not to tell Old Man Hines he knew mechanics or he would never get outside the garage. Dad got the driver job instead at $100 a month and the house in the swamp.

There was this old home, half brick and half stucco, with scaffolding along one side, owned by the trucking company. It sat back from the highway, surrounded on two sides by a marsh, with a cornfield up the hill behind and a cow pasture to the East. Hines let dad live rent free because he was a returning vet, and thus we packed up our meager belongings and moved from 424 Washington for the next two years. (Photo right: me at the house in the swamp, 1948)

That house in the swamp was to have a great impact on my life and personality, but that is a different story. This one is about Washington Avenue.

So how did I get back there for the next five and half years of my boyhood?

Easy, my dad changed jobs for more money. In late 1949 he began driving for Atkinson Trucking; goodbye Hines, goodbye house in the swamp.

My folks moved back in with my grandparents at 424 Washington. At some point a bit later, a house up the street became available for rent and my parents moved there. 417 Washington was a double house next to a Quonset hut of a garage, a business selling farm equipment. (And yes, during evenings or Sundays when this store was closed and empty, I did sneak next door to play on the tractors in the lot.)

That is a picture of 417 Washington taken several years after I lived there as a child.

I think Washington Avenue sticks with me so much in my memories because I lived there in those growing years. All the adventures of my boyhood are centered on that street, both good and bad. My best friend, Ronald Tipton, lived on that street when I met him. Our grade school was across the street from my home. 424 also means more to me than 417, probably because on weekends, when my dad came home from his trucking runs that kept him away from Monday through Friday, my parents sent me down the street to stay with my grandparents so they had alone time. (Photo right: 424 Washington.)

Eventually I will tell more tales of life on Washington Avenue.

Eagle

2011-12-05T21:26:00.001-05:00

On Sunday morning I went to bellevue State Park to take my regular walk. As I got out of my car and started across the parking lot something flew across the sky ahead into a grove of trees to my right.

It looked fairly large, but I only caught it out of the corner of my eye, so I thought it might be a hawk. We have had Peregrine Falcons land in our backyard a couple times this year and you sometimes see hawks standing atop the lamp post alongside I-95.

I turned on my camera as I walked off the lot onto the road starting my walk. As I rounded the first trees I saw a large bird perched on a branch and still thought it was a hawk, but as my route brought me nearer I realized it was much to large for a hawk.

I stopped at the wood edge and thought, "That's got to be an eagle."

I stood there filming and the bird either didn't notice me or wasn't concerned about me if it did. A car went past, which you can hear in the background of the video, and I stepped a little further off the road. At this point the eagle flew up to a high limb on another tree.

I didn't want to bother it, so I went on my walk. I walked, round trip, about three and a half miles. As I retuned along this stretch back to my car I didn't see the eagle anymore. I assumed it had flown off to where ever these eagles go while I was on my little jaunt. I got in my car, but as I left I saw the eagle was still in these trees. It had just moved a bit further back into the trees and was sitting happily on another branch.

I am not sure what kind of eagle it was. I know Bald Eagles lived in this area. This one did not have the white head associated with that breed, but it could have been a young one. They don't develop those distinctive white heads until more mature, around five years old or so. What ever it was it was majestic. When it flew it was like watching a cargo plane take off, large and slow, although it was probably faster than it appeared. I repeated the portion where it flew in slow motion so you can see the motion of the wings and their span.

Last fall the family and I went out to dinner one night and an eagle flew out of the woods directly in front of my car. This was on I-95 not far from home, which is this same region. The bird came so low and sudden I feared I was going to hit it, but it pulled up enough to just clear the car roof. My kids kidded how it would look if I had killed the national symbol.

I wondered if this was that same eagle.

With the Speed of Now Impossible to Play

2011-12-03T06:32:00.001-05:00

I'm feeling my age this week. Angry Assassin Arthritis did a hit job on my right foot. The problem with Mr. Arthritis is he doesn't come by once to stick a knife in. He hangs about and keeps twisting the blade. I haven't had an attack for a while. This one was very vicious, I guess to make up for Arthritis long neglect. It began on Tuesday evening in my arch and it was scream-out-loud painful by bedtime.

At 11:30 I hobbled, with grimace and groan, out to the kitchen to pop some pills, in this case Ibuprofen, not the pill of my choice, but the ones available. The fix of my choice would have been Tylenol Arthritis, but you can't get it. It was the only stuff that really worked for me. The Ibuprofen eased the pain some, long enough for me to get to sleep, but it was back full-bore in the morning and I have been popping pills all week, alternating between the Ibuprofen and Aspirin with one hit of Motrin thrown in by the mercy of a co-worker. (Yeah, I have been working this week at my on-my-feet-all-day job.)(

The two days I was off I managed my walks, too, because you can't give in to the Assassin or next thing you know you give up the walking; you find this excuse or that.

The pain almost went away on Friday and in fact, it left my arch entirely by Friday evening, only to sneak into my big toe and ramp up again. So I took my two Ibuprofens a half hour ago and the pain has lightened and I expect to take my morning amble, but man I am feeling all of my years physically right now.

But last week I was feeling age in a different way. Now I am going to start off sounding like an Old Foggy rambling on about the "Good ol' days of yesteryear," except my yesteryear is more like yesterday.

I've got about 200 CDs stacked up on racks next to my desk. I used to listen to my music all the time as I wrote. For some reason I got out of that habit earlier this year, but last week I decided I wanted to hear my music again. I plopped on my earphones, selected a CD and placed it in my CD player. Silence and the message on the player said, "No Disc".

No disc? This silvery round thing with the hole in the center looked a lot like a disc to me. I understand sometimes a smudge upon the surface can wreak havoc. I pull the disc out and examine it. There does seem to be a something maybe perhaps there. I wipe it across my sweater and plop it back in the machine.

"No disc."

Okay, I'll try a different singer and a different song. I put this new choice in and close the lid. Whirl, whirl, and the number 01 shows in the window and then, "No disc". Hmmm. I pull out this disc that apparently doesn't exist and look it over. Ah, yes, definitely something stuck along one edge. I take it to the kitchen sink and wash it, dry it and return it to the player all pristine and clean, and assumable presentable.

"No disc."

I go to a higher authority, my wife. "Hon," I ask, "have you been having trouble with the CD player?"

She has her own cache of CDs, especially Bon Jovi and The Who, which she does exercising to. She uses the player much more lately than I have.

"Yes," she says.

Tat settles it. She wants her exercise beat and I really do wish to listen to my music. I grab my hat and head out to purchase a new CD Player. Yes, the current one has some years on it now and obviously it has worn itself to a frazzle and cannot perform its duties up to snuff anymore.

First stop, fully expecting it to be my only stop, is Target. I'm looking for cheap, truth be told. I go straight to the electronics department, you known that place one dominated by TV sets, but now a vast warehouse of cell phones. I go up and down aisles, over and over as if some stock clerk might have hurried out to restock, but no CD Players anywhere. There are iPod Docks and MP3 gizmos and for some reason a lot of alarm clocks, but no CD Players.

Now it is down the highway to a Best Buy.

I figure the most logical place to start is the section selling CDs. Wouldn't you put CD players near what they play? I wander about. They have a bunch of karaoke machines (why for heaven's sake!) but I do not see a CD player. Finally I do see a sales clerk, so I ask.

"Sure," she says and leads me off.

We wind our way across the store. "They keep moving things around," she says. "I think they are over this way."

We have moved over to the far flung sections of the store, over to the desert where once computer software ranged. This is the land of the endangered species and sure enough at the end of an aisle are CD Players.

I thank the clerk and wander into the aisle expecting an array of various CD players to pick from. Ha, there are no CD players down the aisle. No, what there is is only on those shelves on the very end of the displays. I have my choice of ... of... one!

One, and there aren't many of that one left either. I buy the one, an Insignia. It's compact. It has a CD player. It has an AM/FM Radio receiver. It has...well, that is what it has. There is no tape player as my old player had.

Let that be a warning, I think. The tape cassette is gone, gone the way of the 8-Track or the record (vinyl) of the wax cylinder. Soon the CD will also be gone and so will the means to play them.

It is speeding up. Their use to be some manufactures slogan (they are probably gone now too) that said, "Tomorrows Technology Today!" I think the new slogan must be, "Today's Technology Yesterday!"

When I was a little boy my parents had these records. They where about ten inches in diameter with a little hole in the center. They were called 78 RPM records. When I got a little older I got my own record player for Christmas. It played these things about six inches in diameter with a large hole in the middle called 45 RPM Records. Next came the 33 1/3s, which were about twelve inches across and back to a small hole in the middle. I built a large collection of these various records over the years. When I got married we bought this nice Fisher Hi-Fi Stereo

That Fisher lasted a long time, but we had lightening strike one night and it blew out that stereo. I bought a new record player and noticed something. It no longer had a 78 RPM speed. Those old records could not be played.

Then we came to a time we could't find nettles. Then we couldn't even find record players. I am not talking some long ago, I'm talking less than 20 years here. Cassettes were ruling. (8-tracks kind of come and went quickly.) Now the tape players have disappeared and the CD players are becoming rare.

I am not against progress and new technology, but I have a lot invested in my music collection. I have about 2,000 33 1/3 Album representing a broad spectrum of American music as well as hundreds of 45s and 78s. I had dozens of tape cassettes and as mentioned, 200 CDs. I don't ask time to stop, I simply ask they keep the old technologies around my lifetime so I can still enjoy the media I have.

Roger in the Hospital (really Ronald)

2011-12-02T13:30:00.001-05:00

When we graduated from high school, my best friend, Ronald decided to join the Armed Forces, but discovered he had a double hernia. Before he could be accepted he had to have this repaired and went into Chester County Hospital for the operation. There were complications, incisions coming open and he caught a contagious infection that placed him in the isolation ward for a period of time. He was a very sick puppy. The contagious ward was in the basement of the hospital and to visit him you spoke through a window too the outside. It was very surreal to be kneeling on the ground talking to my friend through this wire barrier over the windows. He complained to me there were two babies in the contagious ward and they took turns crying. I wrote this piece at that time. (The photo is a more recent of my friend on another hospital visit, not from those dear dead days so many decades ago.) [This story also appears in my All the Monsters in My Mind blog of short fiction as part of the book, Wilmillar and Other Towns.]

ROGER IN THE HOSPITAL

Larry Eugene Meredith

I am behooved to tell the sad tale of my good friend, Roger Walters. I must say it sent a pang of deep regret to see him lying on a hospital bed (of course also a great deal of jubilation that it was he and not me). His face was pale, not at all its normal wallpaper paste white (it was encouraging to see some color in his complexion.) Then, a-sudden, he stared from his bloodshot optics to the ceiling in fright, something that sent terror through me as well, for he was lying on his stomach at the time.

A look of unparalleled fear contoured his face. He stopped in mid-breath, froze in this position. And then the sheet was pulled over his head and face.

He was hiding from the spider on the ceiling. Oh, the sufferings my friend has suffered since he went to the hospital for a routine operation.

He went into the operating room that day back in June with the fear of having a sponge left in his lower regions. He was assured doctors are careful and keep a specific count of the equipment they insert. His confidence was indeed shaken when a dreaded discovery was made after surgery. They took out one more sponge than they had put in.

This was indeed strange for Roger had one other operation in his whole life. He had his tonsils removed when a boy by Doctor Hiram Hickle, better known as Old Doc Butterfingers.

One afternoon the floor nurse walked in while Roger was hanging the doctor (in effigy). She was rather angry about this. Roger was not supposed to be out of bed that soon. She told him to ring her if he wanted to hang any more doctors. The nurses would be delighted to help. In fact, they would even supply the doctor.

Roger’s new doctor was extremely gentle. He claimed to have magic fingers. This made Roger quite happy, but he still didn’t want his back rubbed daily.

Roger was in and out of the hospital three times since the initial Herniatum neresursum gapduplicisum (which is Latin for double hernia operation, I think, but what do I know, I flunked Latin – curse you, Miss Horner), a total of thirty-two days, four rooms and two floors. He was becoming quite annoyed at receiving recall notices in the mail, especially when one came with an infectious infection.

He spent more than a week in the contagious ward, stuck between two babies who worked separate shifts. Such crying...and have you ever seen a grown man cry? It’s terribly embarrassing. For gosh sake’s, Roger, pull yourself together.

The nurses in the hospital are against him for no good reason other than he attempted to push the head nurse out the window. The other patients are mad at him because he didn’t succeed. That was when he was on a higher floor. The contagious ward was in the basement (closer to the morgue for convenience). It’d be kind of silly and fruitless to push someone out a basement window. What are they going to do, fall up? Besides those windows had wire cages around them so no germs could escape.

They discovered he was allergic to penicillin, but this wasn’t what needled him. His main complaint was they kept giving him blood tests.

“ Blood tests?" He said. “They took so much blood one time that I lost ten pounds.” If you saw Roger in those days and he lost ten pounds; then you wouldn’t see Roger.

They let him play the radio, but drew the line when he wanted to practice his Sousaphone.

He almost got drowned right after his third operation. During the procedure there was a call claiming a bomb was hidden in the hospital. When they noticed that Roger was ticking they threw him in a tank of water. Roger probably would have drowned if his surgeon hadn’t asked if anybody had seen his wristwatch.

After his fourth operation, he was told to go home. And that is the end of Roger...in the hospital, that is.

- 30 -

What Happened to Easy?

2011-11-23T07:44:00.001-05:00

A company named Philips has a slogan, "Sense and Simplicity". Well, good for them, I hope they do what they say, but it seems every other business has dropped simple from their vocabulary. I recall once hearing that technology would make life easier. So, why does my most mundane tasks get more complicated?

Like what, you ask?

I'm going to tell you, but first let me ask you a question. How many people does it take to change a light bulb in an automobile?

Three, with at least one having an engineering degree.

Okay, I exaggerate a little; perhaps. That is my car there on the left, a 2005 Chevrolet Cobalt. The driver-side headlight burnt out recently. Okay, no biggie, bulbs don't last forever and the car is over 6 years old and has nearly 90,000 miles, much of it drove in dark, rain and other conditions demanding headlight use, like the infernal and eternal road construction zones (don't get me started on that boondoggle or we'll be here all night - with half our road in darkness).

Anyway, what does it take to change a headlight, right? I had a headlight blow out before, of course, that was many-years ago; er...decades ago actually. The headlight bulb looked like this one on the right.

There was a thin rim of chrome around its outer edge. You loosened a screw on the bottom of this rim to loosen it. Then you just popped that headlight out of a socket and pushed the new one in, retightened the screw and let there be light!

Took five minutes and you were good to go.

Okay, here is your modern headlight bulb on the left. Sure doesn't look like that old one, does it? Doesn't look anything like that thing on the front of my driver-side fender either. No, it goes inside that thing.

Nothing to it, you just have to dissemble one-quarter of your car to do it. You don't need your screwdriver, though. No, you need a socket wrench, some kind of prying tool and probably, as I did, a pair of pliers. You can see technology is making life simpler all ready, can't you?

Here we go, first lift the hood, duh! Get your socket wrench, with the proper size socket (in metric units) and loosen two nuts holding the headlight assembly. Find the plug holding the fascia to the front above the grill and pull it out. Fascia? What the heck is a fascia? Well, it's that thin molding they stick over a lot of your vehicle. So we have identified the fascia, where is this plug. It said plug, right. My fascia had two plugs, a little one up front and a larger one toward the engine. I had to pop both of these to loosen my fascia. (You got a loose fascia, sounds like some kind of medical condition to me.)

It said you grip the plug, well plugs, with your finger tips and pull them out like you'd pull a toothpick out of an olive. Yeah, if you have the grip of Superman and your olives aren't painted concrete. This is where the prying tool came into play. I had to loosen those babies up before they would pop. The little plug gave the most resistance.

Be certain by this point you have unplugged the assembly wires from the electrical harness. You don't want to mess up your electrical system during the next steps.

Now with the fascia loosened, pull it back a bit, which actually you can't really do. You just got to let it flap a bit and let it go at that. Grab ahold of the headlight assembly and gently pull out slightly toward the radiator and it will come off the two clamps holding it underneath. Be careful not to break anything or it will get real costly. That last warning was a great tension reducer, yes sir.

Okay I got it clear and out. It was big and awkward to hold. It has more than one lightbulb in it you know. Oh yes, you may have to go through this routine a few more times in the life of the car. There is your hazard light and turn signal to consider.

I carried this thing into the kitchen to replace the bulb. It probably does get simple at this point - you'd think. You got the assembly and you're new bulb and it goes in a socket. Trouble is, you have to get to the socket, which is buried in there somewhere. First there is a plastic locking collar around the bulb. You press down and turn counter clock wise, but you better have eaten your spinach before hand. There is a lot of grunting on this step, plus a lot of fear you'll break the dang collar or bulb. Oh man, don't break the bulb 'cause it says it could explode. Anyway, this is where I got my trusty pliers. Yeah, carefully trying to turn this sucker. It's been soldered in there by time, but I did succeed and got this out. Now I had to wrestle the old bulb up from its hole. Once this was out, there is a socket to unplug.

Now you take your new bulb, which at first doesn't seem to want to settle down all the way in the socket (and remember whatever you do you don't want to break this gas filled little bulb). Next refasten the socket to the back of the bulb and replace the locking collar. Un huh, the locking collar doesn't want to go back in either. Women push babies out easier than this thing pushes back in place. And you got to turn it clockwise when and if you ever get it down far enough. Once that thing turned under it's holding ridges I felt I had conquered Everest.

I carried the reassembled assembly back outside to my car with some trepidation. I had to push this baby back in making certain the bottom lined up with the clamps I can't see. Well, I did it. It was in my fender and the bolt holes in the fender lined up with the bolt holes in the assembly and I got the bolts back it and then the plugs back in the fascia.

All done, so I get in the car, turn on the engine and the headlight on the driver's side does not come on. My car has those automatic headlights. My passenger side came on, but not my new bulb. I turned the lever from auto to on and now both headlights on both side worked. Odd, maybe the auto required a special bulb that I didn't buy? I don't care. I am not tearing that thing apart again. It won't kill me to manually switch on my lights, as long as I remember to manually switch them off when I park.

However, the next day when I went out, both my headlights were coming on automatically and all was well.

And you see how simple it all was.

Streets

2011-10-17T06:52:00.001-04:00

I sit here this morning about to enter a new street, and not so far away, and yet very distant another long ago friend has come to the dead end of a one way avenue.

His name is Gary Kinzey, and although he died the other day (October 15) and his life became a "was", I like to think his name remains an "is".

It is in my thoughts, it is in my faded memories and it is in various records somewhere. His name and he will always be part of me until I also travel that last avenue.

This is the only photo I have of him as a boy, in the time I knew him as a friend. Film was costly then, to buy and to get developed. For that reason I didn't take as many pictures as I may have wished. It was taken in front of another friend's home, Stuart Meisel, looking toward Lancaster Avenue. The date I have on this is 1952, when Gary would have been 11.

There is a story about the bike. It will seem an odd one to the children of today with their tricked up little X-games stunt bikes, but that bike was too small. Things were larger then; cars were larger, bikes were larger. The bike may not look that small, but for it's day it was. Notice how the seat is pulled high up on the shaft. The diameter of the wheels on his bike were 24 inches; the rest of us had bikes with 26 inch wheels. Two inches may not seem much, but in those days when it came to wheels, size mattered.

And yes, Gary was sensitive about his smaller bike.

We often feel different in life over insignificant and unimportant things.

When I say he died "not so far away" it is because he lived on a street not so far from me and died at home. But I only knew he lived there and only saw him at a high school reunion a couple years ago. My friendship with him was from that now distant time of childhood, when we were sometimes close friends and sometimes not. So now after nearly sixty years much of those days has blurred and faded.

I know I met Gary when we were very young, somehow, somewhere. He lived in apartments a couple blocks east of me and then, I believe, in a small house near where the Farmers' Market stood just outside of town. He seems to have flickered in and out of my boyhood because he moved and I moved and sometimes we were near and sometimes not.

He played the saxophone and I the trumpet.

What we had the biggest in common was trains, electric trains. We both indulged in building elaborate (at least it seems so) layouts. We had different emphasis, however. I was into building realistic landscapes, with papier-mâché mountains full of tunnels, with elevated tracks over felt-green meadows and little towns with rows of stores and bedroom communities. He was much more taken with the electrical mechanics of it all, building a master control of dials and switches where he controlled his world, of light displays and working gizmos here and there.

My room was full of comic books; his had stacks of Popular Electronics.

I thought him an electronics genius. In Junior High he came to class with a fountain pen in his pocket; except, it wasn't a fountain pen at all. It was a radio he had built inside a pen's shell.

His nickname was Sparky.

One of my last memories of Gary was also in Junior High. We were walking side-by-side between classes and for whatever reason, he began to punch me on the upper arm. Every so many steps down the corridor, wham, a punch to my arm. He ignored my pleas to stop and finally I turned and popped him back, at which point Mr. Caskey grabbed me by the shoulder and hauled me to the principal's office. One of the few times I ever got in trouble in school.

Strange the things we recall.

After school, like many other old friends and acquaintances, Gary and I went our separate lives. None the less, we once were friends and 70 is far too young to die.

(Left - Gary in 2002 at Downingtown High School class picnic at Dave Fidler's. Photo taken by Ronald Tipton.)

...To the Dark of the Dungeon

2011-10-02T18:40:00.001-04:00

As I entered the waiting room and looked around I saw the sign on a mantle.

"I guess my wife's out of luck," I said to another man sitting nearby.

"Uh?" he said and I jerked my thumb to the old notice.

My wife is Irish; well, part Irish anyway. She had an Irish maiden name. Her other main parts are German and Native American (one-quarter Creek).

T'is, me Lads, the irony that Mauch Chunk should end up named Jim Thorpe. It is also an example of how this country can and does change usually in the right ways. You see, Jim Thorpe had a part-Irish, part-Sac and Fox father, one Hiram Thorpe. Jim's mother, Charlotte Vieux had a French dad and Potawatomi mom. Hiram and Charlotte named their son Wa-Tho-Huk ("path lighted by great flash of lightning") and raised him as a Sac and Fox. He was also Roman Catholic, which was probably another strike against him in some places in those times.

Jim Thorpe was born in 1888. Eleven years earlier there was an incident in Mauch Chuck that shows he probably wouldn't have been welcome there in 1877, even possibly the decade-plus later when he was born in Oklahoma. He probably would have been shunned or worse for being (1.) Irish, (2.) an "Injun" and (3.) a papist.

To illustrate some of the mind-set of those times I will take us back to those mansions on top of the hill, specifically the home of Asa Packer. I mentioned therein that the Packers, rich as they were, but people of hard-working humble beginnings, existed in wealth a long while without the prerequisite servants, until Sarah Packer reached a point when doing it all herself was difficult. They hired a Butler and a Maid, who each had separate quarters in the house. The Packers, faithful to their Protestant morals wanted to be sure there was no hanky-panky between this single man and single woman. Thus they hired an Irish Catholic Butler and a German Lutheran Maid, knowing one would never have anything to do with the other. (This is another story with ties to The Little Woman, with her Irish father and German mother, and being raised a Lutheran.)

If that is an amusing story, there are many darker tales to tell of the prejudices of those times, especially against the Irish.

The Irish lot on their native sod was not a particularly happy one in the 19th Century. They were viewed as less than vermin by England, to which they were subject much against their will. Many lived in abject poverty; in fact, it was rare if an Irish family was able to serve one piece of meat a year in their meals. Beginning in the 1840s many Irish began to immigrate to the United States and this flow continued well into the 1880s. The English took a "good riddance to rubbish" attitude and encouraged this.

The United States also encouraged this influx of Irish, at least the industrialist of the day did. They saw these people as an underclass, a supply of cheap labor and a desperate people they could exploit. They were not welcome in every place of business, as the sign at the beginning of this post shows, but they were welcomed into the black holes of Pennsylvania and West Virginia where coal could be harvested.

Mauch Chunk was a coal town.

Working as a coal miner was far from paradise, not only might you be digging down toward Hell, your life was the Devil's own as well, barely a notch about slavery. You worked a long day on a dangerous job for very little pay. Worse yet, you owed everything to the company. You lived in homes provided by the company, so leaving your job was forfeiting the roof over your head. You had to buy your own work tools and supplies from the company, which you could get at the company store, where you also bought the other necessities of your life. You got credit on your purchases, so to speak, but then your bill was deducted from your wages on payday. It wasn't unusual for a miner to find he owed more than his pay and so go home with nothing in this pocket.

During the time of this miserable situation grew a secret organization known as The Molly Maguires. How secret were they? So much so historians really know very little about them. Were they the terrorist one owners painted them to be in their day, killing brutally and often? Were they a discredited and maligned group of fighters for labor reformation? Truth is they were probably somewhere in between, but they had enough influence that owners of the coal industry saw them as a threat to the status quo and of course blamed every dirty deed that came down the pike on them.

One such industrialist was Franklin B. Gowen (pictured left). Like Asa Packer, Gowen was a wealthy, powerful man in Pennsylvania. He was the president of the Philadelphia Coal and Iron Company and the director of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad. He was also a former Attorney General.

To say he was anti-union is an understatement and he did everything in his power to destroy any progress by labor that might effect his business. He made this statement about the words of the Declaration of Independence, "All men are created equal":

“Men were not created equal, the distinction between mind and matter, between the men who labored withtheir heads and those who labored with their hands. There [are] two great classes of people in this world, men of genius, or intellectual men, and those who [are] not so, themen of labor."

Anyway, to make a long and fascinating story short, Gowen came to blame the Molly Maguires for all things Union and hired the Pinkerton Detective Agency to bring the group down. Eventually several men were arrested and charged with murder on the word of one detective, James McParlan, who went undercover and acted as an informant. He began accusing Molly Maguires after a murder where he had a hand in and may have been responsible for.

Four men were brought to trial at the Old Jail of Carbon County in the town of Mauch Chunk upon the lone testimony of McParlan. This was not a criminal trial, but a private one in which the county simply supplies the facilities. The Judges were men connected to Gowen and there is the possibilities he rigged the jury. In 1877 four men, accused of being Molly Maguires and murderers were hung inside the Old Jail on gallows brought in for the occasion. They were John Donahue, Edward Kelly, Michael Doyle and Alexander Campbell.

Campbell left an impression behind. Declaring his innocence, he rubbed his hand on the floor and pressed his handprint into the wall of his cell. This was 137 years ago, but the handprint is still there for all to see (I saw it myself). Attempts were made to remove the print, but all failed. Here is the history of the handprint as described at Paranormal@101:

Over the years, county sheriffs have tried to remove thehandprint to no avail.

In 1930, Sheriff Biegler had the wall torn down andreplaced. The next day, the handprint reappeared.

Around thirty years later, Sheriff Charles Neast coveredthe handprint with latex paint, but it reappeared. His son, Tom, in the 1960s,loved to tell friends about the ghostly phenomenon. Word spread and peoplevisited the Carbon County Jail to see the print.

Attempts to wash the image away failed.

In recent years, James Starrs, George WashingtonUniversity forensic scientist, and Jeff Kercheval, Hagerstown MD policechemist, analyzed the handprint using high tech equipment. They found nological scientific explanation for the handprint’s existence. They finallymeasured the exact location of the image in the event it there were attempts toremove it and it reappeared, they would know if the phenomenon returned to thesame location or a different one.

The jail’s last sheriff, Bill Juracka, said he wouldn’ttry to remove the handprint.

Now a days you can tour the Old Jail in Jim Thorpe. It is fascinating and a bit spooky. You enter and get your tickets and then go to the waiting room to await your guide. This area was actually the home of the Warden and his family, so in a sense the Warden was in jail with his prisoners. In fact, when you go upstairs you are brought through the Warden's family bathroom and into a side wing of the jail where women offenders were housed.

From there you wend your way back down into the main cell block where the men were. Here you see the infamous gallows that hung the Molly Maguires and Cell #17, where Campbell's handprint can be viewed upon the wall. (Sorry, they would not allow photographs of the handprint. Now, to tell the truth, it would have been very easy to sneak a picture, especially with my Flip, but I chose not to do that. The photograph seen above is from Weird Pennsylvania.)

To say the interior of the jail is bleak is an understatement. It would not be a place I would ever wish to find myself. That in itself should encourage one to behave. More depressing were the dungeons in the basement. Visiting these isolation cells certainly gave more meaning to the old coal miner's song:

It's dark as a dungeon and damp as the dew
Where the danger is double and pleasures are few
Where the rain never falls the sun never shines
It's a dark as a dungeon way down in the mine.

I don't want to tell some of the stories I heard there because if possible I think you should go and enjoy the tour. One of the amazing things to me is this jail was in service until 1995. I will leave you with a few more photos of the place, including our charming young guide holding up the narrow window through which a prisoner once escapes.

Although this prisoner was only sentenced to about a third of a year, he determined to break out. His method was probably worse than his punishment. First he starved himself until he felt he had lost enough weight to squeeze through the window frame the guide is holding up. meanwhile he stole the soap from the shower room until he had a supply hidden away. On the day of his escapade, he striped naked and lathered up his whole body. With help from his cell mates he pushed this window frame out on its pivot. He tossed his clothes down in a pillow case and flung tied together sheets out to climb down upon. Believe it or not, he got through that window and probably would have been far away, except he attempted his escape at 12 noon. Some women eating lunch on their porch were surprised seeing a foamed up naked man shimmying down the jail wall and...well, he was soon caught.

A word about Franklin Gowen, the head of the Philadelphia and Reading railroad. Said Mr. Gowen was found dead in a Washington DC hotel room on December 19, 1889, a small caliber pistol by him and powder burns on his face. His hotel room was locked and his death at age 53 was ruled a suicide. Stories and speculation arose that he had been murdered, and it was claimed this was done by a Molly Maguire who actually looked like Gowen. It was said this assassin had stalked him for years, had even purchased the pistol using Gowen's name and had hid in the hotel room, did the deed and escaped out the window.

People questioned his taking his own life because he was still relatively young, had wealth, reputation and a family. They saw no reason to think he would do such a thing, so it had to be murder and who better to blame than the Milly Maguires. However, I lean toward it being suicide. Gowen was no longer the head of the railroad. In fact, he was seeing a number of bonds he was involved with declining in value at this time and it might have been more a financial concern that led to his self-elimination.

All photos inside and out of the Old Jail by the author except:

The portrait of Franklin Gowen
The Jim Thorpe Wheaties Box
The Campbell Handprint in Cell 17 is from Weird Pennsylvania.

From the Top of the Hill...

2011-09-30T22:05:00.001-04:00

There are mansions top the hill. This one sits the further up, perhaps not so deservingly so. It was the home of Harry Packer; Judge Harry Eldred Packer more exactly. Harry Packer was the youngest son, the unexpected son, the baby, the only child born when the family was secure in wealth so he was raised without knowing any deprivation or the modest means his older siblings had known.

The obituaries of his day speak highly of him at his death, a man who accomplished so much as a young man, Associate Judge of Carbon County and President of the Lehigh Railroad, as well as Board Member of Lehigh University. All positions he had stepped into after the death of his father as he had stepped into that mansion on the hill his father had built for him. They talk of his long and painful illness, his death from the internal hemorrhage brought about by its complications.

A month before his death, The New York Times reported on his illness, how he was confined to that mansion on the hill and attended by, of all names, Dr. Pepper. Dr. William Pepper, Provost of the University of Pennsylvania assured everyone of the ultimate recovery of the young judge. But at 2:00 AM on the morning of February 2, 1884 Judge Harry Packer packed it in. It was mentioned in the Times that the judge suffered from an affection of the liver. What Harry Parker suffered from were the indulgences and indiscretions he chose to adapt as the spoiled baby of the wealthiest family of Pennsylvania. What he died of, at the age of 34, was cirrhosis of the liver. Harry Packer would have been better off if he had drank Dr.Pepper rather than being examined by him.

The Harry Packer mansion stands today as a bed and breakfast where they hold murder-mystery audience participation plays.

Just a bit down the road from it is the mansion of his father, Asa Packer (pictured left), a rags-to-riches industrialist, who started out building canal boats and ended up a millionaire. Along the way he developed boatyards, construction companies and mining industries, as well as the Lehigh Valley Railroad and Lehigh University.

The Asa Packer Mansion sits high atop his beloved town of Mauch Chunk, now known as Jim Thorpe, PA. He could sit out on the front porch and gaze over much of what he had created, the railroad, the homes of his workers, the town and also the church he faithfully attended, St. Marks Episcopal.

Asa had not come to Mauch Chunk as an Episcopalian. He was a Methodist when he came. He took his family to a church in town and they sat down in a pew to await the service. He was embarrassed when he and his family were told to move because he had sat in a rented pew. He swore he would never go back to such a place of hypocrisy, and he didn't.

The Little Woman and I climbed the multitude of steps and stairs to take the tour of the Asa Packer Mansion. Believe me, their are a lot of steps from the streets of town to the front porch of the mansion. The town is in The Poconos and it snakes through the mountains like a low-lying river. You do a lot of steep walking, as I suppose one should expect when in a burg once known as "The Switzerland of America".

We paused for rest now and agin. I have grown use to scaling mounts from my morning walks through the Piedmonts, but inclines are difficult for the Little Woman, especially since she throw her one knee out of whack trying to keep up with our military trained daughter on a country hike a few months back.

This is the view as you approach the midpoint up the yard of the mansion. The tall pointy building in the center is St. Marks. Some of the brick buildings directly below are part of the Carbon County Courthouse.

The beginning point of the enjoyable tour back into the 19th Century life of the prominent begins on the porch, relaxing in a chair awaiting the guide.

You are led around to the left side and enter the building through Asa's office.

The mansion is not a restoration, but a preservation. What you see is how it was, at least at the time it was willed to Mauch Chunk in 1912 by his daughter Mary Hannah.

The Packers, Asa and his wife, a farmer's daughter named Sarah Minerva Blakslee, had seven children, most of whom died young. Daughters Catherine, Malvina and Gerdrude all died before the age of two. We already saw that Harry Packer, the last born died at age 34. The oldest son, Robert died at 40 or 41. Lucy, the first born was the only child to produce any grandchildren before she also died at age 40 or 41. Mary, who was the third child lived to be 73, the only offspring to live into the 20th Century.

All her siblings having died by 1884 left Mary as the heir to the Mansion and property of Asa. But Mary had a slight problem because of the thinking of the times, which simply put, did not allow a single woman to own property. Miss Packer was not about to let such a silly detail take this mansion away from her. She had a simple solution, she got married to a long time friend, a conductor on her father's railroad named Cummings. This marriage was preceded by one of our nations earliest prenuptial agreements. After a couple years, Cummings went his way with a tidy sum of cash in his pocket and Mary Hannah Packer Cummings sat in her home atop the hill.

Since she produced no children from this arrangement, upon her death her will deeded the Mansion and all its furnishings to the Borough as a memorial to her father's accomplishments. The town accepted the Mansion, but didn't know what to do with it (we all know how ahead-thinking politicians are) and so it sat there gathering dust for forty-two years. In 1954, just before the third wife of Jim Thorpe made her appearance that changed the name of the town, the Bear Mountain Lions Club asked to sponsor the Mansion as a community project and they opened its doors to the public on Memorial Day, 1956. [Gee, the Bear Mountain Lions, all they need is the wolf and they would be Cub Scout ranks. Of course, by 1956 when the Mansion opened as a museum, they were known as the Jim Thorpe Lions Club.]

Although it is a mansion, the rooms had a more homey feel to them than other museums of the rich we've been through. There certainly were many things in the furnishings or the imported wall papers, the chandeliers or the other accouterments that speak of wealth, yes, things people of that era put in their homes as status symbols. Still, for a time the Packers did not employee the staff of servants one would expect those of their financial level to retain. For a long time Sarah Minerva Blakslee Packer did all the cooking herself. She was a farmer's daughter and these type of things were in her blood. When first married the Packers attempted to eek out a living from the soil, but after four years they found themselves as poor as ever and he set out to find employment on coal barges. They were in their fifties when they built the mansion at a cost of $14,000. (Yes, 14 and only three zeros.)

I have not found any unkind word or scandal attached to Asa Packer or his wife. Perhaps his humble beginning reflected throughout his life even after he gained his fortune. At his death his estate was valued at $54,500,000, and remember he died in 1879. Certainly in today's money he would be a billionaire.

Although Asa Packer was a decent man and philanthropist (and Lehigh University charged no tuition the first 26 years of its existence), there were other rich and powerful men in the Carbon County coal towns not so generous to others and those who worked for many of these wealthy barons lived a life far below the top of the hill where the Packer's dwelt.

That is another part of the town of Jim Thorpe we will soon visit.

All photos by the author except:

The two mansion rooms (you are not allowed to photograph inside the house).
The oval photo of Mary Hannah Packer Cummings (from the Asa Packer Mansion Association).
The painting of Asa Packer by DeWitt Clinton Boutelle, 1873.

Oh, Tell I Here of the Hotel There

2011-09-29T14:27:00.000-04:00

No, that isn't a hotel shaped as a Wedding Cake. That is our hands fifty years ago in a mid-September. A lot of fuss is often made of the Golden Anniversary, proper parties and such. But times are rough and no one in my family is in shape to throw a big bash. The best we could come up with was a little trip of a couple days.

We may not even went off on such a thing if reservations and plans hadn't been in place before I lost my job at the end of August. But sometimes the best way to deal with adversity is to get away from it for awhile.

So to what grand and exotic spot did we go to celebrate such an auspicious occasion as our fiftieth?

Mauch Chunk, of course.

Ohhhh-kay, why?

Back in 2008 the Little Woman and I started off on an ill-conceived vacation into Northern Pennsylvania. After eating lunch in the Bear Swamp Diner at Macungie (and perhaps that name was a hint of what was ahead) we traveled northwest until we hit wilderness. After a while of seeing naught, but scrub grass and trees we got the heebie-jeebies about where we might stay the night or even eat. I confessed I may not have planned this out very well as we decided to turn around and flee for more civilization. We ended up having a wonderful few days staying in Gettysburg. (You can get the gory details of that truncated jaunt here -- Getting to Gettysburg: Jim Thorpe and Traveling is Broadening.)

Well, between Macungie and dread, we passed through the little burg of Mauch Chunk. (The Little Woman said it sounded like some kind of animal eating. Not far off, the name means Bear Mountain in the language of the Lenapes.) The town was very crowded that day and there seemed no where at all to park, so we only saw it from our moving car, but the Little Woman thought it charming and intriguing and ever since that day wanted to go back and visit the place.

By the way, although the rail station reads Mauch Chunk as do many signs in the place, it is better known as Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. Jim Thorpe (pictured right) is considered by some the greatest American athlete ever, even the greatest world athlete. He was born in Oklahoma and, like the Little Woman, was part Irish and part Native American. In 1904 he left the Okay state to attend the Carlisle Indian Industrial Boarding School where he first came to fame playing football for the Carlisle Indians. He went on to excel in football, baseball, basketball and win Olympic Gold metals in track.

So, he never lived in Mauch Chuck, perhaps never even visited, and Mauch Chunk isn't exactly a suburb of Carlisle, which is his connection to Pennsylvania. But like all humans, Jim Thorpe, super-athlete that he was, died and when his home state of Oklahoma wouldn't erect a memorial to him, his wife (his third) got angry. Most powerful weapon of mass destruction in the world is an angry woman. She made a deal with Mauch Chunk, an old coal town dying, and they erected a monument and renamed the town Jim Thorpe. He was interred there (His son began a lawsuit in 2010 to have his body exhumed and reinterred on Native American ground in Oklahoma.). His Wife got the memorial she felt he deserved and Mauch Chunk got new life as a booming tourist town. (There is a certain irony in Jim Thorpe and Mauch Chunk coming together this way, but I'll get to that in another post.)

This post is about hotels.

The Little Woman and I have been fortunate enough to do a little traveling. We have over time stayed in some interesting and historic hotels. Not the big grand ones, such as the Waldorf-Astoria, although we did spend a couple night in it many moons ago, but smaller, perhaps lesser known hostels.

(On the left is the Little Woman relaxing in our room at the Waldorf-Astoria, New York, 1962.)

Here are some of the very old and interesting places we have enjoyed staying at over the years:

The Inn on Canal Square in Lewes, Delaware. We have been privileged to stay here several times in recent years. The photo here was from earlier this year. It rained all the first day and then turned to snow overnight, which turned to a blizzard burying the Mid-Atlantic. We always stayed here out-of-season because of the cost in season.

The Lighthouse on Casco Bay at Sebasco, Maine. Like The Inn on Canal Square, we had a marvelous view from our room of water. Here we were overlooking an expansive bay and inlet rather than a canal. It was an unique place to stay.

Part of our room in the historic Hawthorne House, Salem, Massachusetts. The infamous "House of Seven Gables" was a short walk away and across the street was the "Salem Witch Museum". Yes, in was named for Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Independent Park Hotel in the Old City district of Philadelphia, just around the corner from Two Street; surrounded by the history of our country's founding and a few steps away from a world of dining experiences, from an Havana Street at Cuba Libre, the Indian cuisine of Cafe Spice, to eating off a coffin in the Eulogy Belgian Tavern.

These are all fine establishments, places I would recommend to anyone, at least if they have remained as they were when we visited. But here I want to sing the praises of The Inn at Jim Thorpe. I would put it at the top of an enjoyable carefree stay for comfort, cleanliness and accommodations.

Jim Thorpe seems to have a way of taking you to other places, but more on that in later posts. There is a certain reminiscence of New Orleans to the Inn. This had caught the Little Woman's eye when we passed by several years ago.

The flowers trimming the railings are real, I hope anyway, since a man is watering them.

Parking is ever a premium in this town and for a moment I feared I would find no room at the inn for my car (actually the Little Woman's car). I drove about the rather cramped lot twice. It was quite filled-up it seemed and had narrow stretches I had to maneuver to escape on the first run through.

I had to exit thought a alleyway, which grew more cramped the further you went. This deposited us back on the main street we had originally entered from, much to my anxiety. There were no sign of parking spots along this avenue.

"What do we do now?" I said.

"Go back around where we went before," said the Little Woman.

I gave her a questioning look, but did so.

"There," she said as we entered the lot again, "turn left."

Up ahead upon a wall that ended this drive was a sign saying, "Inn Parking" with arrows pointing both left and right. We had turned right before and ended up exiting.

"I thought I saw more parking to the left," she said.

But the left was not a lane to extra parking, simply an indication that spaces lined this side of the drive. I pulled forward and amazingly, glommed what was apparently the last possible spot of the moment.

Yes, that is our little red Fit tucked away between two walls and a large SUV, almost a feeling of being in a garage.

If the parking lot seemed a bit -- oh, I don't know - spooky, intimidating, cramped, this was not the nature of the Inn once inside.

The hallways were like compressed galleries in an art museum, festooned with paintings right and left to escort us to our room on the third floor.

I look at this picture and realize it is some what surreal; it must be the Dali wing. The way the left wall appears to wave and waffle.

I think it sets the mood for this very interesting town.

Someplace that changed from street to street, a place still somewhat frozen in a bygone era, a place of fascinating history and a place with surprises around each corner.

We were in room 312, what was called a mini-suite.

The Little Woman was thrilled when we threw back the door and entered. Ahead we could see a wide-screen television. No, it was not the TV that made my wife thrill; I mean, come on. It was the mantle of what the TV sat upon, a working fireplace.

I am not exactly certain why she has this love of fireplaces, but she does. We had stayed in a hotel in Monmouth, N.J. a couple years ago, near the university. We were there for a concert and I didn't want to make the long trip home so late at night, something ironic as it turned out. It was one of the Marriott Residence Inns and it had a fireplace. Oh, the little woman looked forward to coming back from the concert and nestling down together before a blazing fire.

It wasn't to be. Leaving the University we got hopelessly lost and didn't find our way back to that Inn until the wee hours of the morning, weary and shaken. The Little Woman didn't get her fire and I traveled more miles late at night than I would have going home.

I sort of hated telling her that you couldn't light the fireplace here until October. I had read that in a room description on the website. However, no one at the checkin mentioned not using the fireplace nor was anything posted or in the Welcome to the Inn book in the room. I was tempted to flick the ignition switch and see if anyone squawked. There was wood in the thing. But I didn't.

There were plenty of amenities in the room beside the TV and fireplace. There was A/C and heat, of course. There was a CD player and clock radio, a DVD player hooked to the TV, Coffee Maker and assorted coffees and teas, a microwave and a refrigerator stocked with free bottled water.

There was also a ceiling fan and a skylight, which made other lamps unneeded most of the day. We were blessed with two beautiful, sunny days, a nice respite from all the rain of the last month.

There was another amenity, which we both made good use of and did it ever feel good on this old body, a whirlpool bathtub.

Sorry, it was not surrounded by mirrors so no accidental catching of me splashing about in the altogether.

On the floor below was a lounge for those who wanted to use such a place. Besides some magazines there was a shelving unit holding several board games.

As nice as these facilities might be, we preferred to be out and about the town or snug in our room.

The staff here was very accommodating. In a reversal of the maid accidentally walking in on the guest, we walked in on the maid or maids actually. The two young ladies were very friendly as we sat about watching them work. When the one noticed the coffee we preferred, she left us extra of it.

On Sunday evening after we returned from dinner, the Little Woman had a hankering for a candy bar. Finding such a thing seemed a unlikely mission, but I set out into the dark and empty streets to try. I saw a couple places that probably did have candy, but they were closed. I returned to the hotel defeated, but in my best conspiratorial voice, asked the Desk Clerk if they had any candy bars hidden about.

"No," she said, "but Dugans sells candy bars and he is still open. It is just a block up the street."

She was correct and I came back with a half dozen assorted candy bars. The Little Woman was happy, which is what you want.

The Inn was once known as the American Hotel. In the 1800s it was one of seven grand hotels that graced the town, but today is the only one still remaining and doing business. Those were the days when Mauch Chunk was a tourist destination second only to Niagara Falls and people flocked in to dance at The Flagstaff, its "Ballroom in the Sky". By the time of Jim Thorpe, Mauch Chuck may have long shed its title of "wealthiest town - per capita - in America", home at one time at the same time to 13 millionaires, when a million dollars was real money. (I'll let you in on a secret: a million dollars is still real money to me, so anyone who feels it is chump change can toss it to this chump.)

Anyway, this is the hotel of which I tell and I would tell you to stay there is you ever have the desire to lay over in Mauch Chuck. Maybe go during the October Fall Foliage Festival and ride an old train up through the Lehigh Valley River Gorge or take in Jay Smar, singing coal country classics in Josiah White Park.

And while there enjoying the peace and quite or the colors of changing leaves or the wonderful Inn at Jim Thorpe, learn some history.

See the upsides and downsides of our history. Learn of Asa Packer. Learn of the Molly Maguires. Visit, by all means, the mansions on the hill and then do not overlook or miss the dungeons of the Old Jail.

Then you will know why Mauch Chunk indeed.

All photos by the author, except the portrait of Jim Thorpe.

Why I should Stop Being Lazy and Carry My camera

2011-09-16T14:29:00.001-04:00

I guess I am lazy, but I hate to carry anything when I walk. Thank goodness I wasn't born a woman, I could never tolerate a pocketbook. But I have come to the conclusion I need to get over this laziness and carry my camera. You see, I keep my camera in a pouch strapped to my belt. Very convenient, but very difficult to get to quickly. As a result I am missing some interesting pictures, such as the fox I met face to face on the trail a bit ago. The fox froze in a perfect pose, but by the time I got my camera out it bolded into a nearby field and I missed it.

I've missed a few more good shots the last couple of days.

Today, for instance, I thought a stroll up Rocky Run would be enjoyable. I haven't walked that path recently, especially with the rain and floods we've had. I went up the path, but at the meadow the trail disappeared into a marsh of mud and water. I didn't feel like sinking over my shoe tops thus I backtracked a little ways and went up what I call High Ridge. It is up atop a mount and runs parallel to the main trail. I walked back and followed up where it rises even higher up the Piedmont and through the woods and emerges on a campsite high on the hill. Then I turned around and came back.

As I was walking I heard a twig snap to my left. I glance over and thought I saw a white shirt and movement behind a bush. That made me edgy. Why would anyone be back there? It is the deep scruff and there is no trail, only rough ground and thicket.

I walked on and another twig snapped. I stopped and stood looking over in the direction of the sound. A few moments passed before I realized I was being watched. There between two trees stood a large deer staring at me. I don't know if it was a buck, it didn't have antlers, but it was very large and quite handsome. I reached to my pouch, but as soon as I did it bolted back into the brush. I saw another set of legs follow, so I have no idea how many deer may have been there.

But once again I missed the shot because my camera was zipped away at my side.

I continued down off the mount to Rocky Run heading out this time. As I reached that trail two dogs came bounding up it toward me. The lead dog was a Yellow Lab, looking much like my dog, Tucker (who died earlier). The other was also a large dog, but all black.

As they ran toward me, I froze. They had been at a distance when first I spotted them and there was no sign of a person about. The dogs stopped directly in front of me and I began to stick one hand out for them to sniff. Suddenly the yellow lab begins barking at me. The black dog quickly follows suit. Both are blocking the path and barking and making little lunges in my direction. I am saying something, probably, "It's okay, fellows."

I am glancing about for something to protect me, like a large sharp stick, when I hear a woman's voice far down the trail call a name and yell, "Come here!" The dogs pay it no mind. Finally two women appear and after several calls and admonishments to the pooches, the hounds turn tail and run to them. I see them snap leashes on the beasts.

The women are very apologetic and assure me this was very unusual behavior. We have a little chat of pleasantries and they go up the trail and I go down. After while I wonder if I should have told them of the deer. I wouldn't want the dogs to go chasing, but it is too late now. I go on.

I am coming up the main trail and happen to glance left at the creek. The Brandywine is several yards beyond this trail. There is a narrow barrier of trees along the left side, then the ground dips down to a large apron of grass. Across the way I see the Great Blue Heron sitting up on a downed tree branch.

I ignore the brush and press through the tree line, cross a patch of mud (this whole area had been under water a week ago) and pull my camera free as I step over the grass to the shoreline of the creek. Amazingly the great bird doesn't fly away as it has every time in the past I have tried to film it.

I stand on the bank as still as I can for nearly a half hour filming the Heron. I am staying so long now hoping it will raise its wings and fly so I can capture that graceful departure. But it doesn't leave. It stands on the branch and looks about. It preens itself, looks across at me, but it doesn't fly. I finally move on. I have the bird recorded, but it is still at a distance. You can see it in the photo at the top of this post if you look closely. You can almost see it better in its reflection in the water than its actual body against the background.

But this is what I mean, for the day before I had been walking on the Northern Greenway from Rockwood to Bellevue and back. Coming back I turned a corner and there was a Great Blue Heron standing directly in the middle of the path not more than 15 feet away. Magnificent, what an opportunity, but as usual, when I began to unzip my camera pouch it took flight. For such a large bird it disappeared very quickly.

Later, as I was driving through the woods after my walk, heading home, a pelican flew directly in front of me. This was rather unusual for around here. Perhaps the pelican had been driven northward by the hurricane, but it was definitely a pelican. I was driving then, so there was no chance of retrieving my camera from its garage on my belt.

As disappointing as it was to miss these pictures of wild beastee and bird these were't the most disappointing of all. That missed shot had come earlier on my Rockwood-Bellevue walk.

When I parked at Rockwood and exited my car, I also pulled out my camera. There were three large trees that had been uprooted near the gazebo. I filmed these and walked up the hill and around past the mansion. Here I took some more film of those trees from above. Now I walked on, taking some shots of downed trees and branches in the mansion yard. I decided I would film the creek that ran alongside the woods I was entering. I had been here the day before and that creek was roaring, splashing high over rocks and creating the white foam of rapids.

I came down today and no roaring, no big splashes, no foam. The creek was wider than normal, but pretty calm. I decided not to film and to put my camera safely away in its little black pouch. I stood on a curve of the path struggling to get my camera back in its bed. The pouch isn't large and I carry my id in it (I don't take my wallet or money on my hikes) and also my car keys. It took some effort, but I got the camera in and zipped the pouch closed.

Now as you pass through these woods to the rear of Rockwood you see a community of homes across this creek. Up ahead of me was a footbridge over the water that joined a path which meandered through that community and if you followed it, you could walk all the way into Alapocas Run State Park.

I noticed a woman standing just on the other side of the bridge. As I came nearer on my path, she stepped out to the middle of the bridge and leaned against the railing to the far side from me. She was looking down toward the creek. I then noticed a man on my side, presumedly her husband. He was on the grass and walking down the embankment toward the stream bed.

They were saying something to each other, but I couldn't hear.

He disappeared behind the bridge and down the slight hill and suddenly she pulled her shorts down.

I do not know why, but yes, she pulled her shorts down and she was wearing nothing beneath.

I do not think she was mooning me because I am fairly certain neither of them were aware I was there. They had both been intently looking down at the stream. Perhaps it was an accident, a wardrobe malfunction. I have sometimes had my pants slip down, in fact, a regular happening this year after I lost several pounds when I started walking regularly again, although I always caught my trouser or shorts before they fell that far.

Maybe she was flashing her husband.

I do not know the reason and she pulled them up a moment later. I only know if I had kept my camera in my hand I would have recorded that posterior for posterity.

I must get over my laziness.

Upticks and Updates: More Why the Rich Get Richer and You Don't

2011-09-16T07:47:00.000-04:00

That is pretty much the stock market these days. They seem to jump this way or that on whispers of the least little thing. Yesterday the Dow jumped up 186.45 points for what reason? What have we heard this week that says buy? Retail sales last month were flat, nothing was selling, especially clothes and back to school didn't sent people out spending this year. The number of people beneath the poverty line rose, the medium household income fell. Europe is in financial turmoil. We had a rise of violence in the Middle East. First time unemployment claims were up...again; and the unemployment rate didn't fall. There were no new jobs created last month and a number of employers announced big lay offs to come. The cost of living rose and ever people are moving in together in homes, which tends to decrease spending for goods.

It was noted Wednesday that mortgage applications rose last week because the interest rate had fallen to a new low. Well, hallelujah, happy days are here again. Of course, a good number are people refinancing while they got the chance to maybe lower their payments. Meanwhile, a way too high percentage of home sales are on foreclosed property and foreclosures remain a problem, bloating the inventory.

Stock Markets went well up today on the belief now that Greece won't default. That is the state of it now. We don't have stock growth on positives, just that the worse negatives don't occur.

But no matter the state of the state or whether Greece is well greased or not, it doesn't mean you can't make money in the market if you are a Wall Street type and have wealth. If you have lots and lots of money you can play the Long and Short Selling game and you can even make money by betting stocks are going to fall. If you have enough dough, you can even manipulate the rise and fall by buying large amounts of a stock.

The rich guy buys enough of one stock hoping others jump on the bandwagon seeing his buy and they start buying and the stock goes up. Then when the rich man wishes, he dumps the stock at a high price and sends it plummeting. Once it has bottomed out, he may buy it back at the low cost again. This is having your cake and eating it too. The guy makes money on the profit from his initial purchase and then buys it back low, thus keeping his profit and having the stock as well.

Now to update y'all on my previous post, "Tangles of the Ticker Tape: Why the Rich Get Richer and You Don't". In that piece I spoke of a certain CEO who bought 342,876 shares of his own company at $.92 a share. That was the report I read that day. It seems he actually bought a bit more than that over a couple more days. He bought another 342,876 shares on the 9th at $1.19 a share and then 481,714 shares on the 13th at $1.36. Notice how each time he has bought, the price has been higher. He spent $1,378,599.40 overall and do you know where that stock stands now? It is currently at $1.59, meaning if he sold it this instant it would sell for $1,856,270.94, a tidy profit in a week of $477,671.54 less broker fees.

Now the price has went up because his purchases gave confidence to other investors to also buy that stock. They believe if he has this much faith in his company turning around, he must know something. So, his money enables him to manipulate the price upward.

Could you or I do that? Well, if you be rich, probably. I am not rich. I might have been able to buy, oh say, 100 shares of that stock at $.92, a cost of $92 (plus broker fees of course). I don't think my ninety-two dollars or my reputation is going to encourage any followers to jump on any stock because I do. Then if I sold my 100 shares at the current price I would make a profit of $67 (less those broker fees cause brokers gotta eat too). That is a nice gain on my investment of 73%, but a long way from making me rich.

Besides, by the time we little fish jump in the pool, the sharks have driven the price to the heights, then they drain the pool and leave us high and dry. Of course, a bit earlier in the day I could have made $79, but by the end of the day that stock dropped $.12 since the opening

Will the stock regain today? Will it continue up, stay even, begin to drop back where it started? A lot will depend on how well the CEO's new business plan succeeds. If the efforts to turn the stores around faultier, then so will the stock price, and then will the CEO dump the stock for a profit or go down with his ship?

We shall see.

Waters Rose, Factories Close, So It Goes

2011-09-13T15:16:00.002-04:00

There is a great similarity between this year and June of 1972 in the upper central portions of Pennsylvania. Land covered by flood water. In 1972, Wilkes Barre, Pa. found itself devastated by a little lady called Agnes. The storm and those floods were to have a direct effect on the course of my life.

That particular year found yours truly gainfully and happily employed by Olson Brothers, Inc. aka Olson Farms, Inc. We broke eggs.

Yes, there is an industry known as Egg Breakers.

The name is pretty much self-exclamatory. We would buy eggs, we would break eggs and we'd sell whatever we could get out of those eggs.

My position there was Office Manager/Cost Accountant. At the end of that year I was Assistant General Manager, but that was a brief tenure. The whole experience was somewhat weird, I suppose. In that year I learned a lot about corruption, bribery, stupidity, bullying and never putting all your eggs in one basket.

CORRUPTION

("Broken Eggs", Jean-Baptiste Greuze, 1756)

They say getting there is half the fun. My half of the fun got lost somewhere along the line, replaced by a lot of anxiety. I had been working for a bank, but my managers lied to me. I don't take being lied to lightly and I resigned. But before I dove off the deep end, I did go out and seek another job. I was able to be offered a position within two weeks of looking, and then I quit my banking job.

But then I wasn't hearing anything from my new boss. Time passed and I called the man and a person answered and said he was unavailable. This was not boding well. I had been told he wanted me to start before the person I was replacing had left, so I could get some training. But now the days ticked away and I had still not been told to report and the last day for that guy came and went. Finally I received a call and was told to report on the next Monday.

When I came to work that first day what did I find? A lot of missing people is what I found. The person I replaced was already gone. The General Manager, who had hired me, was gone. The new General Manager was gone, apparently to Puerto Rico although why or for how long was not known.

Eventually all this became clear. The man who had hired me had suddenly quit and disappeared to parts unknown. It was a mystery because he was something of a legend in the industry at that time, well known and the company was certainly showing a profitable operation. I know, because one of my duties was to do the Profit & Loss Reports each month. Each month our statement of condition certainly showed us well in the black and we were running at full production. However, this seemed odd because we didn't seem to be selling a whole lot.

I was to unravel this conundrum, conscientious accountant that I was. I decided to take a physical inventory of stock. Most of our product was frozen egg, frozen whole egg, frozen yolk, frozen white, frozen salted egg and frozen sugared egg. If their was a part of an egg you could freeze, we froze it, excluding the shell. So at the back of the plant was a huge freezer where all prepared egg product was stashed until sold.

Except it wasn't being sold.

I crawled about over and under and around all these big containers of frozen hen fruit, counting and checking off my list each drum there. Well, what do you know? No wonder the old General Manager was looking good. He was running at full production alright, but he was simply storing all that outcome away. We weren't looking good on the bottom line because of our low per unit cost and brisk sales, we were just carrying a very high over valued inventory, most of which would never leave our freezer.

Thus what product that did dribble out to customers was being sold way below cost.

This discovery was one of the nails in our coffin.

BRIBERY

There is no better way to learn a job than to be thrown into it with no one around to tell you how to do it. You just do. With the old boss out the door and the new boss on a distant shore and the once-upon-a-time holder of this job on to his next, I had to pretty much teach myself the egg business. The production manager certainly helped me on that and in the absence of the General Manager, who was officially the wheeler and dealer of the place, we had to step into the gap.

We did pretty good even though neither of us had any experience in buying and selling. We did have one philosophy about it, buy low, sell high. You'd think that was obvious, but I'll come back to this in a bit.

You'd be surprised (or maybe not) by what comes about in the egg business. Eggs are pretty durable product actually. You can store them for like six months if kept at the right temperature and a lot of eggs that look ugly are perfectly fine. Farmers sold us the eggs the supermarkets wouldn't carry. They might be oddly shaped or discolored. Some might have hairline cracks. Some were too small or too big. Mainly they just didn't look all nice, even and pretty sitting in a dairy isle.

You candled every egg that passed through the doors. Mostly you are checking for any fertilized eggs or eggs with blood. Such things would not please the Rabbi.

I guess I should mention the Rabbi. The Rabbi came around couple times a year and wandered though the plant. If he liked what he saw, he would certify your product as Kosher. Now lets be brutally honest here. We knew when the Rabbi was coming and the day before arrangements were made, or should I say rearrangements, so nothing was touching anything that would perhaps conflict with the Laws of Moses, at least not until the days after the Rabbi left again. And also, the rabbi didn't spend a lot of time on his inspection. He tended to whisk through the place until we handed him the check for his services. His services did not come cheap. That check had a one on the left and a whole lot of zeros to its right.

Now, I'm not saying that transaction was a form of bribery, but I will say this next instance probably was.

Representative of a big time chicken guy came in to visit one day, trying to make a deal for us to take more of their eggs. Eggs weren't what they built a reputation upon, it was the chickens that lay the eggs that they concerned themselves with. They sold some pretty good tasting roasters, but I will tell you, they shipped us some of the worse eggs you'd ever lay your eyes on, let alone smell with your nose. Although I had the "white-collar" job of Office Manager and Cost Accountant, there were times my duties extended to a more hands-on approach.

Not that I wanted to lay hands on that companies raw materials, but I was out there unloading their truck and what I unpacked was black eggs, rotten eggs and eggs with maggots.

Now here comes this representative wanting us to take more of this stuff from his company. He came in like a movie cliche, big old cowboy hat and a sur'nuf down home good ol' boy accent, with y'alls and back slaps all around. "Want you boys to come visit our plant," he says. "We'll take good care y'all. You come on down. We'll get you a woman and a good bottle of bourbon."

STUPIDITY

Remember that thing about buying low and selling high? Well, after a few weeks our new General Manager finally shows up back from Puerto Rico. He's all proud because he made a deal to sell the people on the Island a lot of egg white to make meringue.

Now that he had returned, for the moment, the buying and selling was back in his hands. He apparently hadn't read any pillows stitched with the production guy and my philosophy, because he bought high and sold low.

Now, and maybe this will surprise some, but there are consequences to buying high and selling low, and to having an overstocked inventory, and of running full bore full productivity when your sales are underperforming. It is called, NOT MAKING MONEY! Now that the inventory ploy was exposed (by yours truly) and the valuation reevaluated our bottom line so it didn't look so great. It looked a little red in the face. Things needed tightening up and our General Manager's idea of tightening up was not paying our suppliers.

This resulted in some suppliers refusing to sell us anything and those who would demanding a premium to do so. In other words, our buying high got higher.

Then one day, this new General Manager was gone. It really wasn't unusual for him to be gone. He was gone a lot, a la Puerto Rico, but he wasn't selling more meringue this time. Oh no, turned out he had another business on the side and he was devoting more hours to that business than to our eggs. And like our egg products, he was canned.

I suppose this belongs here under stupidity, but I thought I had a bright future with that company. I liked working there, liked my job, liked the people. It looked like we were going to expand. They were going to buy a bigger and better plant in Blue Anchor, New Jersey, move operations out of the confines of North Philadelphia. They had big plans, big dreams and here I was in on the ground floor of all this expansion.

I revisited my old employer, the bank, and discovered those managers who had lied to me were gone. In their place was the former auditor and he asked me if I would come back to work there. He even asked me to name my own salary to do so. But I told him I had a great opportunity where I was and turned it down.

Then my wife and I moved to New Jersey. C'est la vie.

BULLYING

Despite the corruption and the stupidity, it actually looked for a while we might turn it all around and get that dream factory over in Blue Anchor. But something else happened, which I'll get to later. The result of what happened I will deal with here. Basically, we tanked.

When things became clear that hope was going south, the company stopped production altogether. Everybody in the back was laid off, all the sorters and the sniffers, the washers and the breakers. These people weren't paid a lot to begin with, now they were getting nothing.

It wasn't long after the workers were laid off that there came a loud knock on the office door. I happened to be there with my secretary and no one else. We answered the knock and there were these gentlemen standing there who would have made find cast members for The Sopranos. These were guys who instantly made you wonder just how much broken kneecaps hurt. They were Teamsters, the Union that represented our now laid off work force.

Were they here to plead for the works jobs? Not exactly. They wanted us to know that they expected us to make sure these workers continued to pay their union dues.

I told them we couldn't do that. They would have to deal directly with their members.

As you can see I am still around and my kneecaps are fine. I can't speak for those long ago workers.

NEVER PUT ALL YOUR EGGS IN ONE BASKET

So what happened to finally kill that job? What promoted me from Office Manager to Assistant General Manager helping to oversee the dismantling of the plant? A sweet young thing known as Agnes.

This hurricane came up the Eastern Seaboard and inundated upper Pennsylvania with water, lots and lots of water. Much of the same area was flooded by Agnes as suffered the same fate last week. Up in Wilkes Barre was a big company called Interstate Bakeries. Interstate Bakeries was our biggest customer, too big to fail, at least too big to fail us.

In reality, Interstate didn't fail. They had an old factory in Wilkes Barre and it was destroyed by the floods. Rather than rebuild this ancient structure, Interstate decided to pull up stakes in the region and as a result, they no longer needed our egg product. And without Interstate, we had no reasonable chance to make a profit.

Good bye Blue Anchor. Goodbye Philadelphia. For me, hello unemployment. No company, if smart, should ever depend too much on one large customer.

One other lesson I learned there. Never eat dog food. Eggs rated not fit for human consumption went into big barrels and was sold to pet food manufacturers.

And Then...

2011-09-11T19:44:00.001-04:00

I was on the computer at home, not particularly unusual for me in the morning. It was somewhat later than a normal Tuesday though. For most of the Tuesdays for 21 years prior to that one I would have been sitting at a desk at work by 8:30 AM. I wasn't this time because I had been "retired" the week before.

I was putting together some information about my career for an outsourcing meeting I was to have later in the day.

At some point I was skimming the web when a headline popped up. It said, "A plane has accidentally crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City."

How odd. I figured it was a small plane, some private jet gone astray. I left the computer and went to the living room and flicked on the TV. I didn't have to search for news. By now it was on all the channels and it was not some little plane. It was a big plane, a large commercial jet.

And then...

A second plane crashed into the other tower and this was no accident.

There was chaos, confusion, panic. Another report quickly followed, a plane crashed into the Pentagon in DC. Rumors floated in, reports of planes here, there, everywhere it seemed, although most quickly proved just false fears...except one, which crashed in a field in Pennsylvania.

On the TV it seemed some disaster movie was playing, one with amazing special effects. Giant plumes of smoke poured upward over Manhattan.

And then...

A tower crumbled downward, great pillows of dust rose like a poisonous fog embracing all that stood about it. People were running, screaming, down the streets. Behind them came the dark gray shroud, seemingly chasing after them, trying to swallow them up.

No one knew anything. The images just kept going on and on and I sat down and watched, unable to take my eyes off what was happening, and like the chattering reporters I listened to, knew not knowing why it was happening.

And then...

Our way of life forever changed. Things have been different ever since. There is never a true sense of real safety. Doing many once mundane things has become more inconvenient, especially flying. Wars have been begun and they go on and on and on. And I don't know who to believe about anything anymore.

During that morning I wondered about my meeting. It was to be the first of several to teach me how to get a new job. I tried calling the place, but no one answered the phone. I didn't know whether to get dressed and drive to the city or not. In the end I decided not to go and as it turned out I made the right choice.

My meeting was to be held on the top floor of the tallest building in town. Someone made the decision to cancel all activity in that building for the rest of that day. No one knew the targets. My city was a financial center, a banking town, and the tallest building was owned by a then very well known, large New York bank.

In the days afterward I talked with a friend who had also been kicked out of a job where we had been employed. He was also scheduled for a meeting in that same tall building on that day. He had other things on his mind that morning. One of his daughters worked at the World Trade Center and the train she took was scheduled to arrive at a station beneath the towers at 8:45 AM. That morning he wasn't concerned with finding a new job, he was concerned with finding out if his daughter was safe.

In one of those strange quirks of fate, his daughter had been to a party on Monday evening and coming home tired, had forgot to set her alarm. She over slept and missed her train. She was safe.

And then...

For sometime after I felt a nervousness whenever I was out walking and a plane engine caught my ear. We are on the path for landing at Philadelphia International Airport. Planes come overhead low in the sky. I would look up and wonder, "Isn't that plane much too low?" There are chemical plants all around us, and refineries, and just across the river a nuclear power plant. And so I would watch the plane move into the distance with that thought, "Isn't that plane too low?"

That is some of what I remember from that day.

Photo taken by the author.

Tangles of the Ticker Tape: Why the Rich Get Richer and You Don't

2011-09-09T10:14:00.000-04:00

You can consider this a companion piece or a sequel or the continuing saga of "We All Must Do Our Part to Save a Sinking Ship."

We are approaching the infamous tenth anniversary of a hateful attack on America. I am certain there will be a million Blogs, columns, TV Specials and other media reports commemorating that dire event. This is not one of them.

9/11 marks a tenth-year anniversary for me as well, one of lessor importance overall, but one of some trauma in my own life. On the morning of 9/11 I was scheduled for my first meeting with an Outsourcing Firm on the top floor of the tallest building in Wilmington. For some reason the meeting was cancelled and that building was evacuated.

I had just been jettisoned by the company where I had worked for 21 years. It was not for cause, in fact, along with another, I shared in rescuing from the ash heap a five million dollar blunder made by management. But I was 60 and a long-timer with a very good record, which meant I had a decent salary from a number of merit increases over the years and more troubling, expensive benefits. Therefore my unrequested departure was simply a case of economics. A number of us fellows and gals whose hair had turned gray and teeth had grown long, if indeed we all still had our hair and teeth, were set adrift to lighten the load on the bottom line. If at fifty-five many places offered us a senior's discount, to this company at fifty-five we had become discounted seniors.

Officially the department of my employ had been reorganized and my position eliminated.

I was to find myself on the law of diminishing jobs several times over the last ten years. I worked at a place for a year and a third and then was handed a letter stating I was being let go "due to cost reductions". I worked another place for four and a third years and found my hours greatly reduced and my days numbered do to faltering business. I left there for a promising situation, which did not blossom and after a year and a third (you gotta watch those fractions, especially one-third) I again became familiar with the phrase, my position eliminated. All these were economic considerations not in my favor and reminders of the old saying, "The rich get richer and the poor get poorer." I fall on the second side of that, I have definitely grown poorer.

Now I don't 100% subscribe to that bromine. But I got to tell ya, I don't completely discount it either.

There is another old saying, "It takes money to make money." If this is true, friends, then I am plum out of luck.

So let's review a bit about my last bounce into the ranks of the unemployed. But do not worry, I will not push up that 9.1 unemployed stat. I don't get counted. Anyway, I played my part in the grand plan to save the ship, which had barely floated the last five years and had a whopping loss in their last quarter pushing them ever deeper into the water of red ink. They got rid of the lowest level of employees, who really contributed little to the company failures, but are easy to make walk the plank. They plan to close 10 to 12% of their stores. Or as some one said on a financial message board, and I quote, "I just hope that the stores they are closing are the ones that are NOT profitable...lol".

And of course, the CEO gave up his $1.00 per year salary.

Perhaps all this has bailed the ship out, especially that last, for yesterday when the stock market fell over a hundred points, this company bucked the trend and jumped a whopping 27% in their price. I mean, this was a stock with a steady decline, a penny stock that had fallen below a dollar making it a risk of being dropped off the NASDAQ board. Even though we are talking in cents, this sudden jump upward caused a bit of chatter and speculation.

What happened was the CEO snapped up 342,000 shares of his companies stock at $.92 a share. I guess dropping his $1.00 a year salary didn't dent his wallet too much. This is an expenditure of $314,640.

Perhaps this shows great faith in the company's future, putting your money where your mouth is, to use one more old cliche in this little broadside of mine. Perhaps this will infuse confidence in investors. At the very least, perhaps this will push the stock price above the one dollar sticking point and keep it listed on the NASDAQ.

Indeed it did accompanist the latter. The stock, in a down market, finished yesterday at $1.15. Yahoo, way to go and all that to the credit of the CEO for saving the ship from being striped of recognition in the world of Wall Street.

But there is a darker possibility and it is why the rich can get richer and you can't. This CEO bought this stock at 92 cents and by days end it closed at $1.15. On paper, in a few hours, this man made $78,660. That is not a bad days work, despite the fact no real work was involved. If he sells this morning he will grow richer over a cup of coffee.

Now I can't imagine he would do that. If he did it would go very badly for this company. But you know this type of quick profit taking goes on.

If he holds the stock, maybe the company will rebound with their fall collection, with their new TV marketing campaign, with their adding numbers of clerks and salespeople to the lines at the unemployment bureau. If so, well, then the rich man grows richer and I'm sure we will all be glad for that.

After all, none of us want to see our good old sayings prove false.

Photo is of the Breakers, the Vanderbilt Mansion in Rhode Island, taken by the author, 2009.

Dark at the Edge of the Road

2011-09-06T14:18:00.001-04:00

The call came about 9:30 Labor Day night. I didn't hear the phone, but the id flashed up on the bottom of the TV screen. t didn't recognize the number, but it was a cell phone with a local exchange. I thought I should answer it. I headed to the computer room where the main phone resides.

My oldest daughter was in there working on her novel. She answered the phone.

"It's Darryl," she said. "His car broke down."

I took the receiver. "Where are you?"

"Along Route 1 heading up. I'm between the toll booths."

Between the toll booths covers a wide territory. I told him I was on my way, but it may take awhile.

My daughter asked if I wanted her to come along. "Sure, if you want."

We rushed out. She had to move her car so I could get mine out of the drive. She pulled her car back into the driveway and then we headed south. It was dark, drizzling off and on. We weren't thinking clearly. I should have written my son's cell phone number down, but didn't. I thought my daughter had told her mother what happened, but she didn't, so now my wife got worried when we were gone so long since she didn't know where we went.

Oh well, I didn't know where I was going anyway, not exactly.

We went via I-495. I almost missed my exit lane. I had gotten in the habit of passing it every day I went to work, except I didn't have that job now, did I, and I had to make a last minute swerve to make the exit.

We were on Route 13 and my daughter said I needed to get over a lane. I did so and Ker-blang, something heavy and solid hit the undercarriage of my car. My daughter said their was debris in the road, car parts or some such thing. Now I am concerned if the object did any damage to my car. What if I break down, too.

My daughter asks, "Do you have a spare tire?"

"Yes, but don't even think it."

Of course now that is in my head as well.

We make it onto Route 1 south. We cross the fancy bridge and we go through the first toll booth. Now it is a mystery of where he might be. We are trying to see across the highway and medial strip for any white car parked on the opposing shoulder. It is hard to see that side of the highway.

We keep driving.

There are several cars along the highway as we pass mile after mile. None of them his. Oh, wait, on our side was a white car. Was that him. Didn't he say he was heading up, maybe I misheard. I'm too far past, man, I hope that wasn't him.

"I don't think there was anyone in that car," says my daughter.

We drive. We see some cars along the opposing lanes, but none are white. The second tollbooth is in Dover, maybe we will have to go all the way there.

Then we see a car the other way, parked with its hazard lights blinking. Behind it is a police car with all its flashers flashing. It's a white car, that's him.

Now we need a way to get around to the northbound lanes. We have to go to the next exit, Smryna, three miles. Three miles never felt so far. We exit and must now get to the other side of another decided highway. We drive awhile to a turn with left turn arrow lights on red. We wait. There is no other traffic, but these red lights won't change. Are they broke? Come on, change, before I am tempted to run you. We wait. Finally they change and I make a U-turn the other way. (U-turns are legal in delaware, in case you are wondering.) I have to drive quite the distance for the entry back onto Route 1 north. There are several false left turns before the real one.

Now the three miles north and then we pull onto the shoulder just ahead of my son and the cop. We get out and walk back to his car. My daughter gets in. I lean in the passenger side window fishing my AAA card out of my wallet.

The cop strolls up beside me.

"Callin' AAA, eh?"

"Yes."

"They take their time down here. Usually takes them a couple, two hours to come."

"Oh,well,"I say.

"You gonna wait here?" he asks. "Maybe they'll tell you you don't have to wait for the tow." He paused a moment, thinking. "Course maybe you shouldn't just leave it. You wouldn't want to leave it here. Somebody'd hit it sure enough."

I'm giving my son the number. he's dialing. Hands me the phone.

"They probably won't come for a couple hours. You gonna stay for that"

"You got any suggestions?" I say.

"Yeah, better stay though. Wouldn't want anybody to hit you."

I am talking to AAA, the lady says they are putting me on priority because of where we are. A tow will be there in about 30 minutes. I tell the cop this.

"Okay then. Well, probably be longer. I'll leave you. I'm gonna put a couple flares back here."

He lit a couple flares and stuck them in the shoulder behind us. He left and I pulled my car further up the shoulder so the tow truck would have room to pull in front of my son's car.

We sat in his car and waited. His phone rang. It was the two driver, said he would be there in 10 to 20 minutes.

We waited. It a dark and lonely stretch of Route 1. Every few moments a car or an 18-wheeler would road by. The big trucks shook our car. It was a bit scary being stranded there in what was now late night. We kept stretching our necks back, looking for the tow. False alarm, just a car, that's a semi, where was the tow?

It seemed a long time, but finally some blinking lights, a turn single, a tow truck pulled in front. The driver told us we didn't have to hang around we could go. We left him fixing to hoist the car and we drove north.

It was raining steadily. I hate driving at night, especially in the rain. The further we went, the harder the rain. We finally reached our home grounds, got off the interstates into town.

My son was hungry, he hadn't had dinner. We hit a McDonalds.

The tow truck we left behind working to secure the car had beaten us home. He was waiting two door up the street. He dropped off the car in front of our house.

My hands were shaking. I was too pumped to sleep. My son and I watched Pawn Stars repeats for while. I finally grew sleepy enough to go to bed.

This morning he took my car to go to work. I drove down to a mechanic in town. Then I called AAA once more to have it towed the couple miles from our place to the garage. They said the policy was one tow per breakdown, but since it was labor day and late night when it happened, they would wave that and give the tow for no charge.

The new tow truck guy called. He was on his way and fifteen minutes later he arrived. He was a nice guy. He tried to jump start the car, but that failed, so he winched it up on his truck bed. Of course it began to pour rain at that point. I felt bad, he had to get down and under with the chains in that downpour, leaning in the gutter. He wished my a better day and he was off.

Now we wait to see what this will set my son back. Sometimes I hate cars.

Parsley, Sage, Larry and Time at the Arden Fair

2011-09-04T16:10:00.000-04:00

It must be the end of summer, at least the traditional end, for here we are at the Arden Fair. It comes but once a year, on Labor Day Weekend.

This is my neighboring community and an interesting one. It is perhaps the only community on the National Historical List. It goes back to the early earliest 20th Century and was part of a utopia movement of created towns. It had unique ownership rules, tax structure and has long been the home to artists, sculptors, writers and other creative people. There have been some famous people who lived or visits the village in the past.

There are theaters there, Shakespeare plays, music concerts, poetry readings, and the Fair. It draws a crowd, an eclectic mix from all over the area, including yours truly.

It takes over the center of the village, with lanes of booths selling all sorts of crafts and wares from Gild Hall to the outer limits of Arden proper. The place is made of three named areas,Village of Arden, Ardencroft and Ardentown.

Here is how Wikipedia describe it:

"Arden is a village and art colony in New Castle County, Delaware, in the United States, founded in 1900 as a radical Georgist single-tax community by sculptor Frank Stephens and architect Will Price. The village occupies about 160 acres, with half kept as open land. According to the 2010 Census, the population of the village is 439.^[1] In 1973, the entire village was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Two neighboring villages of similar size were founded on Georgist principles, Ardentown, in 1922, and Ardencroft, in 1950. In 2003 they were also listed on the NRHP. Many Ardenites, as the villagers of Arden are called, consider themselves to be "close-knit, nature-loving, liberal, tolerant, free-spirited, artistic, intellectual, even ex-hippie."

My wife and I have often kiddingly called it a place where Trolls live under the bridges, but in all honestly it is my kind of place and I am not sure there are even any bridges in it.

I decided to make a visit too the fair my morning walk yesterday. It is perhaps a mile and half to chug out of my place, up the road and into the Villages. The road is narrow with not much of a shoulder that runs through the place, and is heavily traveled. I have walked along the road through Arden, but with fear for my life. Since I always here into the interior on the right, amble up its curious streets past the Candlelight Dinner Theater and Eden Rock Home, until a cross street where I can then cross to the fair at a traffic lighted cross street doubly made safe by a State Policeman on Fair day.

There is no cost for shuffling hear and about the fairgrounds and take in the sights. One can stay quite a time and not spend a dime.

One could, in turn, stay a brief time and spend a fortune. If you begin to peruse the wonderfully varied vendors selling very imaginative wares at not what I would call Hippie prices. Of course it does say, ex-Hippie, doesn't it.

I am not tempted by these trinkets and treasures. Two years ago I did by a T-shirt memorializing the 100 anniversary of the fair.

However, do not think I am not lured by temptation. I spend a total of $5.50 on what I always graviate to at the fair. Food.

Oh, nothing exotic. I hat a hot dog and French Fries. The fries were terrific, hot, crispy outside, soft inside, tasty. I am a long time fan of carnival type fare, things you can wander about chomping upon.

There were other things to do. For the children there was a complex of rides, some sort of bungee cord thing, slides, pony rides. There are potions and cures. There are games of skill, a flea market and down in Shady Grove music of different styles all day long.

I walked down to the crowded grove and caught the end of a Sousa March.

The Fair began at 10:00 AM and I arrived about twenty after. As I was walking in, a lady was walking out. "Leaving already," I laughing asked.

"Taking a break," she replied. "I've been here since seven. When you work the Fair, you need a break."

I bet you do. This thing is all volunteer and it must take a lot of hard effort to pull off.

When I had reached the light at the cross over, I was behind a young lady on a bike with two miniature collies cheeringly dropping along with tails away. The back of her tee shirt read, "Old men Rule!"

"I'll go along with that," I told her.

"Absolutely!" she replied with a smile.

As you can guess, dogs are welcome visitors at this event. Everywhere you go you see canines of every shape and size. There are special watering stations for "your thirst dog" here and there. I don't know if there is a dog porte-potty.

At any rate, it was a beautiful day for the fair and a wonderful day for walking, so I had a charming, delightful venture. Here are some faces of the fair.

THE END

Blow Off About the Big Blow

2011-09-04T12:16:00.003-04:00

With much ballyhoo, hype and fanfare, Hurricane Irene blew up the coast a weekend ago. There were places hard hit and others not so much. As bad as it may have been for some, it was hardly the cataclysm storm of the century predicted and harped upon by the many TV reporters sent out into the wind and rain to stir up our emotions. being forewarned and prepared is one thing, scaring people to death is another. There is no need for every major TV channel to go 24/7 with these things. Regular updates, fine; features in the scheduled newscasts, fine; all day on the Weather Channel, appropriate, but otherwise shut up about it.

We were very fortunate here on this street where I live. Damage was certainly minimal, mostly branches down and twigs scattered all about. A few streets over from me that big tree pictures uprooted and fell against the house.

A good many folk in the county lose power for varying lengths of time. My own went out about 10:00 PM on Saturday night as Irene regaled us with her opening salvos. Sunday morning I was up early as usual and then by the dawn's early light sat reading a book by the front window. I heard a large vehicle coming down the street and turned just in time to see a white rear of it pass by and down the street. I couldn't see what it was, but guessed it might be a Delmarva Power Truck. I has buried with my book, a couple of cats and a pillow so was not quick to extricate myself and get to the front door to try and get a better look. Agin I only caught a white tail as it turned left on the lower street.

I decided to follow and see if I could find out where it went. I walked down the street, turned and at the next drive behind us saw a DP&L truck parked halfway up that avenue. I walked up as an orange suited gentleman in a hardhat walked behind a house with a large limb in the drive. The occupants were standing outside. The power guy told us a transformer had blown on the next street over and we would probably have our power back in two hours.

He was right. At ten AM our lights snapped on, which is when we discovered we had no cable, so no TV, no internet and no phones. The cable came back on sometime around 9:00 on Monday, then went out again around 4:00PM. It returned again sometime around 7:00 PM and so far as remained. As I said, we were fortunate. Some people in our same community, just on the other side of where I-95 cuts us in half, didn't have power until at least this just past Thursday. I went out Thursday morning for my regular walk and their were nine Delmarva trucks and crews along that street and one tree services the power company uses.

After a few tried, I was finally able to get back into the state parks for my hikes. Brandywine Creek State Park was a mess.

I shot some video just before Irene arrived and then the morning after. I shot some walking about my community and then more in some of our parks, Bellevue, Bringhurst Woods and Rockwood, but mostly in Brandywine Creek State Park. These videos follow (four altogether). I suggest you turn off my music player by scrolling down to it and then turn your speakers up some.

We All Must Do Our Part to Save the Sinking Ship

2011-09-03T08:08:00.004-04:00

There I am at the helm of a compactor. One of my everyday duties at the two places I worked over the last five-and-a-half years was taking out the trash. It's honest work and someone must do it. Remember the saying about acting? "There are no small parts, only small actors."

Same with work. If my life was a movie there would be a scene, two people smartly dressed sipping morning cups in a nearby overpriced coffee boutique.

"See him," says one over the rim of his Frappe a Beaucoup d'argent Cafe Mocha.

The other, bent over his MacBook Pro desperately seeking to finish a report for this morning's meeting with the Audit Committee, glances over. "Yeah, so?"

"Sad case," says the Frappe-boy with a grimace as the bitter under taste of expresso hits his tongue. "Used to be a Bank Officer, now he empties garbage."

Trash, my friend, trash, garbage usually contains discarded or wasted food product. And taking out the trash (or garbage) is a very important job. The main difference between Frappe-boy and myself is I may buy a good morning coffee at McDonalds and he fritters away his money on, well, that thing for the appearance of it.

Speaking of garbage, I have discovered something about restaurants and the discarding of their leavings. They are very sloppy about it. I know this because in both my recent positions we shared the compactor with nearby eateries. At first I though it was just this one that was inconsiderate in this matter. I would tote my bags of debris to the hopper and find it filled to overflowing. It is important for you to know that in a mall community each depositor of trash is supposed to compress it after dumping. You are also expected to breakdown any cardboard cartons to flats. I was always very conscientious about these rules, not so my culinary neighbors. Boxes and bottles were heaved with mutual disregard to space or consequence, thus unbroken cartons and broken glass. And spaced in-between were plastic hulks containing all the garbage of the day, often untied or punctured so sauces and other slops flowed about the mess.

At my first site where I emptied trash the compacter had a large open hopper, similar to a dumpster. This would sometimes be filled to above the compactor top with the smelly, smeary mix from the restaurant and I would have to attempt compacting this before I could even get my own in, all the while fearful some leaky unfastened bag of garbage would tumble upon my head.

At my second site the compactor was all enclosed. You open a door and shove your refuse in. Save for that, the restaurant we shared with was no different. The hopper upon opening would contain what had been stuffed within and left unsmushed and only the door prevented a falling rain of slop from hitting me, but the sill of the opening and often the very door would be smeared with old melted cheese, pasta sauces and I dread to think what else. On my last day of trash discarding I had to stand in a pool of such a mixture to reach the hopper. Spillage did not seem high on the list of the restaurant's concerns when it car to garbage disposal.

Despite the sins of the restaurants, you meet a lot of interesting and friendly people in the narrow confinds behind the store rows. I always thought of us as the back alley people, the members of a society most store patrons never see. I was very proud of my career amongst the back alley folk. I'd rather chat with the back alley guys and gals any day then spend my mornings with the Frappe crowd at Starbucks. The people who clean our spaces, haul away our junk, mow our lawns, sweep our streets and in general pick up after us are doing some of the most important jobs around. If you don't think so, then get rid of we back alley people and see how you like eating surrounded by un-bused tables or working at a desk littered with all your past debris. And you don't even want to imagine ever again using a Porte-Potty.

Which brings us at last, by a rather circuitous route, to my subject of the day. It really has nothing to do with trash disposal, that was just something I felt like getting off my chest. No, you need go back a couple paragraphs to the statement, "On my last day..." I was relieved from the ranks of the back alley people last week, my last day being as it were the 27th.

Why did this happen, you ask, did I spill too much trash in that alley? Not at all, not at all, it has more to do with my former employer corporation announcing their second quarter earnings on the 31st. Oops, did I say earnings? Slip of the tongue because you can't really think of a $27 million dollar loss as earning anything, except perhaps pity. Chucking overboard me and people of my low station is part of the grand design to save the sinking ship or the last grasp at a bailing bucket. But in such emergencies we must all do our part.

I was quite impressed then when I read this headline from "The Idaho Statesman" in Boise as reprinted in "Businessweek Online" September 2.

"CEO of Idaho [company] won't get a salary."

The article went on: "Sept. 01--The chairman and CEO of [an Idaho]-based Corporation is giving up his salary as the companystruggles to regain its footing in the women's retail market.

On Tuesday, a day before the companyannounced lower quarterly earnings, the board of directors approved [the CEO's] request for no salary. [He] will still get employee benefits."

Well, way to sacrifice, sir, for the good of the group. Don't we wish all CEOs would take such measures when the companies they guide run into the shoals?

And then I read the next sentence in the article.

"[The CEO] earned a $1 salary in fiscal2009 and 2010."

Maybe it is a misprint. Perhaps the paper or the website accidentally dropped a few zeros behind that $1. If not, maybe the CEO should also give up those employee benefits like I did...oh wait, I didn't have any employee benefits.

But as men we must do what we must do. I am certain the dropping of my hourly wages and his $1 will save the company. Don'tcha think?

Rite Back to the Past

2011-09-02T16:24:00.000-04:00

Some of you, whose memories may be working at a higher par than my own, may recall a mention of my blood pressure among all the waiting I previously posted about. All the waiting may have help escalate that blood pressure in fact. It may also come to mind I spoke of visiting my doctor. Whether you do or not, that is the case. My doctor insisted she get a chance to look under my hood before she prescribed anymore pills for my engine pump. I complied.

After my run in with the berserk testing machine at a pharmacy, which held me prisoner within its cuff well beyond the minute it had promised for the reading, I entered my Doctor's back lair with some apprehension. That machine had said my pressure was 220 over 140, which I believed was somewhere outside the normal scale. I had come home and did my due diligence by Googling "extreme hypertension". I got an article that said a pressure like mine (actual a shade lower than mine) was called malignant hypertension and suggested if I wasn't already dead that I should be in a hospital. So-o-o-o what was the Doc going to say?

My weight was down 12 pounds since my last visit, so that was good. I wasn't having any plumbing issues, not really, except when I had to go, I HAD to GO! The technician and the Doctor both slapped the sphygmomanometer cuff about my arm in turn and my reading was 147/80. A little up, but not too bad. Doc had me take a cardiogram. It was the same as a year ago and quite normal. After all was said and done, I was ruled reasonably healthy and destined for longevity. She then pulled out her iPad and zapped my new refill prescriptions directly to my pharmacy.

It is important to note this was at midday of Wednesday last. Now a couple hours past midday on this Friday I went to that pharmacy to retrieve my freshly minted pill packets. Will I experience the same long lines as the last three times I have visited there in the past week?

Well play me a German Folk Dance and slap me silly, there were a mere two people in line ahead of me. I should be through in a whistle. The first customer seemed to be getting quiet a few bags. He must have received a separate pill for each organ of his body and then one to counteract the interaction between this melange. Finally they loaded his purchase on a forklift and hauled him to his car.

The gentlemen directly ahead of me stepped to the counter. The clerk went to the wall then to the computer empty-handed. Ut oh, been there, done that. "Sir," says the clerk, your insurance company won't allow us to do another refill of that prescription until the 23rd."

"I don't understand," says the man.

"Your insurance company won't pay any portion of this prescription until the 23rd."

"Ah," says the man. "What do I do on the 23rd?"

"We will just fill it on the 23rd, sir."

"Oh, will you call me like before then?"

"Yes sir?"

With this the man walked away and I was up to bat.

"Name?"

I gave it. The clerk walked to the wall of plastic bags. He shuffled about. He came and looked in the computer. He walked back and began speaking to a pharmacists. Haven't I played in this scene before? If they come and tell me it wasn't sent it I think I will become a bit unkind. I sat there when the Doctor wrote it out and emailed it over.

The clerk comes back. "The doctor hasn't finished counting the pills for verification of a controlled substance. She will be finished shortly (there is that shortly again). In the meantime, just have a seat over there.

Oh, I suppose I will have the old, "Larry, you may get in line now" moment coming. Okay, I wonder, does it take two days...and as I sit my eyes wander to a large poster on a far wall: "The 15 Minute Prescription Guarantee* 15 Minutes, or you get a $5 Gift card." That is not the only such placard, there is another by the counter and another on the side wall and there is a tiny one by the register. The same thing is printed on the face of the pamphlets that come with each vial of pills you receive. You know, those foldout papers telling you of all the varied and sundry side-effects that just may kill you before your medication cures you. "If when taking this medication your leg falls off or your eyes pop out or you experience sudden death, immediately call your primary physician."

I waited much longer than 15 minutes the last three times (in the last week, need I repeat that as well) I stood here for prescriptions. Nobody dropped any $5 Gift Card in my bag. Maybe I should ask about this. At that moment the pharmacist called me up to the counter and rang me up on another register. I didn't have to get back in line this time. I didn't demand any gift card. I don't think it was 15 minutes this time and the pharmacist was so nice and pleasant I couldn't keep my anger.

It took me back a moment when she said, "$42." Whoa, Nelly, shouldn't it be $14. I stuttered out, "F-f-forty-t-t-two d-d-dollars?"

"Ninety day supply," she said. "Is that all right?"

Yes, it was. I had forgotten the Doctor told me she was doing that if my insurance company allowed. Fine with me, I hate running back every month.

Still, I wondered about that 15 minute business. But you see, it read: "The 15 Minute Prescription Guarantee.*" You see there is an asterisk. That means, what you think you just read is not at all what you read. That asterisk means in the end they are going to bite you in the asterisk.

I read the fine print: * (see asterisk at the beginning means this is what you should have read and then you'd know why you'll never ever received a gift card in your bag, sucker) "Guarantee applies to prescriptions dropped off in-store and at drive through only." (I was right, the Johnny-come-latelies got preferential treatment over we nice, considerate people who allowed the pharmacy time to prepare our goods.) "Certain exclusions apply..." (That generally means you're the exclusion.) "Certain exclusions apply including prescriptions requiring ordering, prescriber contact, third party assistance, professional services, or prescriptions presented immediately before or during Pharmacist lunch break." Good luck getting that gift card, Charlie!

Oh, I better pop a pill, I think my blood pressure is rising.

You Can Bank on Waiting

2011-09-02T10:44:00.000-04:00

Once upon a time there was a strong and fiercely independent Family who dwelt in the land of the great Baron duPont in the village of Bankingshire. There were several proud families very like them striving there, but one by one they disappeared into the clutches of great and powerful Lords of Grab and Grasp from outside the realm. All these once noble names of Bankingshire disappeared, their legacies but memories. Except for this one family and somehow they resisted and fought and retained their name and history.

But like many a family empires preceding and surely many to come, discontentment with what they had seeped in and they began to overreach, growing careless and casual in their dealings. As a result, weakness was found within their house and soon they too fell to outsiders from a distant land.

And because of this I found myself having another change forced upon me late in life. My bank, The Bank, where I had served for many years, until they unceremoniously cast me overboard a decade ago, had fallen under a shadow that wouldn't pass. Instead it only grew darker, until they had no choice but to abandon ship. I now faced a transition of not only my financial services, but my pension as well. Do not think I did not worry.

Especially when between an earthquake and a hurricane, I lost my job. But what could I do about it except wait things out. (I'm sorry. I just looked at my photograph and two images came to mind and I don't want to mention either. Use your imagination.)

As fickle fate would have it, the Great Conversion fell on the dates Ms Irene choose to make an impression upon our little state. Just on the eve of when the new rulers of my money were about to rip off the bags over their new signs, Irene ripped down our electric wires and our cable services. Now just as I must call and activate my new access cards, because on that Friday my old had become deactivated, I had no phones. Now when I had to switch my on-line banking service, I had no internet and with no internet and no new on-line banking service, I could not see if my accounts safely made the transition and more importantly, would my pension deposit be deposited.

I've been through many conversions in my life. I have seen few (make that none) without a glitch, hiccup, speed bump or worse. It did not help that over the many months of anticipation as this conversion slowly, but inexorably moved toward completion, my peace of mind when The President said he could not guarantee Social Security Checks would be sent and my job seemed shaky. Amidst these my mind wondered would my pension get lost in translation?

Of course, the politicians made moot the Social Security question in their usual cowardly way. They simply kicked that can of worms down the street for some future gutless politicians to contend with. My shaky job soon collapsed over an abyss and fell from sight on the eve of both the great bank conversion and the hurricane. This left only the banking questions to be resolved.

After the winds blew by and the creeks rose and the power returned and the cable connected I opened a new on-line account at my new bank. Not too difficult to create, but not much to look at once I opened it. I have three accounts and all were supposed to make the trip. I see one, I see two, I see...I see...

I see one and I see two is what I see. Where is three? I look around the screen. I scroll up and down. I click on a few links, maybe it is hidden behind one of these. I do not find account number three. This is not a good thing. This is not a comfort. If they lost a whole account, one in which I OWE them money, what will they do with my pension where THEY owe me money?

I will have to wait a few more days to know the latter answer, but for now my concern is my missing number three. I see a link that says "Add an Account". Perhaps I have to add this one. After all, this one was a credit card and they not only converted banks, they switched credit card companies on me. Maybe that is why this one requires more from me here.

I click the "Add an Account" and begin filling out a form asking for account name and number and vital statistics, but I pause. At the end it has a fill-in blank labeled, "Pay this Amount". Hmmm! This isn't adding an account, this is adding a payee for Bill Pay. I don't want to pay any amount right now. In fact, if my pension deposit doesn't show up a few days hence, I won't be able to pay any amount to account number three, even if I do find it. If I don't see my pension deposit in a few days hence, maybe it'd be better if account number three stay lost. I cancel the form and return to my somewhat skimpy home page.

Then I notice near the bottom, "To add an account call 1-800-And-Wait." (That's not the real number. Don't call that number. There is no number 1-800-And-Wait. It is not a number, it is what you are going to do when you reach the real number.)

It lists the times of day you may call. I have to wait for the proper hour and when the clock strikes the time, I dial. A mechanical female voice answers with a greeting, a welcome, followed by, "All our circuits are tied up at the moment. Please call back later." Hoo ha!

High tide in the anxiety pool.

There's that word again, wait. I must wait until later and later I call again, around four in the afternoon.

Our cheery little mechanical greeter is there with another welcome and instructions: If you want this thing, press 1; if that thing, press 2; if another thing, press three and so on and so forth until, "If you haven't pressed anything because you are so overwhelmed by our 87 choices, then press 88 and we will start all over again. Just for your convenience. This time pay attention and press something."

I didn't know what to press, nothing quite fit my situation. There was no press zero for a real, live, possibly-even-breathing individual. So I did the next best thing, I picked a number at random and pressed. Our cheery greeter was back, but with a difference message. "We are experiencing a higher than usual call volume. Please stay on the line and our first available representative will be with you shortly." Meanwhile I get to enjoy the most sleep-inducing music I have ever heard on hold. I mean, I didn't want to be subjected to be-bop or hip-hop or rap or reggae or some kind of death metal play, but I wasn't ready for lullaby-time either.

Fortunately my dozing was interrupted at frequent intervals, about every other minute, by our digital hostess announcing the lines were still tied in knots, but "our first available representative will be with you shortly." Of course, "shortly" is a relative thing and it obviously was no relative of the bank's. After numerous "short-lies", a man answered.

He introduced himself. "Hi, my name is Peggy." And I introduced myself, "Hi, my name is confused." We were going to get along great. I begin to explain my missing number three account when I hear a click and nothing.

"Hello, is anyone out there?" followed by "did this guy HANG UP ON ME!" followed by my wife walking in the room announcing, "The cable is out."

Oh yes indeed, the cable was once again kerput. Along with my lost number three account was lost TV, lost internet and lost phones. I didn't lose everything. I still retained my sense of futility and frustration.

Our cable service didn't return until later that evening, too late now to call back. In the morning I decided to go to the nearest branch, track down my AWOL account face to face, Mano y Mano or Womano y Womano. Why does optimism ever ring in my heart? I drive to the bank, park my car and amble across the lot then do a U-turn back to car, to road, to home, to phone. Why did I not know the bank branch would be full. It just converted and I was probably not the only owner of a stray account or transaction about town.

I call the 800 number and our computer-generated Matron'd answers. Apparently they are firing on all circuits this morning, so she goes right into the laundry list of press-worthy buttons. They have still not added my particular problem to the menu and I still do not know an appropriate one to select. I choose to select a different one than I did the day before.

"We are experiencing a higher than usual call volume. Please stay on the line and our first available representative will be with you shortly."

I am back with the sleepy-time music and the constant notifications to stay tuned for the next available representative. And eventually the next available representative answers.

"Hi, my name is Peggy."

Wait a minute, this is the same available representative I got yesterday after pushing a different button. No wonder all their circuits are tied up, what do they have -- ONE! I mean, I was kidding about his name being Peggy, but now I'm not so sure, maybe this is Peggy. Or maybe I have entered the Twilight Zone or worse, this is Groundhog Day repeating itself over and over.

I don't want to disparage the man or imply he was anything like "Peggy". He was very nice and turned out to be quiet helpful, but in the beginning as confused about my missing account number three as I was. He also was having some computer glitches of his own. He asked me for some info on my on-line banking screen and I fumbled about seeking it, explaining that I was using a new computer and going through a learning curve.

"I'm going through a learning curve myself," he said. "I'm actually a former Wilmington Trust employee learning this new system."

He then asked if I minded going on hold while he asked his supervisor some questions. Ah, sweet dreamland.

After a couple snores my nap was cut short by the guy. "I'd like to ask you to do something," he says.

"Okay."

"Sign out of your on-line banking."

I did so.

"Now log back in again."

"Okay."

"You should see your credit card account now."

Yes, I see it, I see it, it has come home. I thanked him for solving my problem and now all I needed to wait on was whether my pension check would show up in a couple of days.

A couple of days later I went back to my on-line banking account full of fear and trepidation. The accounts popped up, all three, and yes, my pension deposit was there. I was so happy, so relieved, that I even made a payment to the credit card.

I am waiting for...Wait! I've Been Waiting So Long I Forget What I was Waiting For

2011-08-31T14:37:00.002-04:00

I'm a patient man. I've raised children, have a wife and had a dog. If you don't learn patience then your kids hate you, your wife divorces you and your dog bites you. I have spent much of my life waiting in parking lots and doctor's offices, so I am a patient man.

This past week seemed designed to test the patience of Job.

First was the highly hyped anticipation of Irene.You think of all the jokes about waiting for a woman to get ready for a date, it seemed Irene was taking forever to get made up for her grand entrance.

Then we were waiting anxiously to get rid of the big windbag.

When she finally went off in a huff, we found ourselves waiting for the lights to come back on as she took our electric power with her. We were more fortunate than some, our power was out but 12 hours, and much of those overnight doing sleep time.

And when the power did pop back, we had to wait another day to have our cable services, so another 24 hours of no TV, no internet and no telephones. This came back on sometime while I was taking my morning walk, then went off again in the afternoon and came back hopefully for good after we returned from dinner Monday evening.

So speaking of my morning walk, this was also part of the waiting game. I usually walk in one or another of our wonderful nearby state parks. However, they had closed the state parks last Thursday for the convenience of Hurricane Irene to spend time there alone. Apparently one of her favorite pastimes is knocking trees over and overfilling creeks and rivers. I wondered on Monday if any were now open. I decided to try Bellevue, which is the closest, just a short spin down I-95, where I can often see if the gate is open or not from the highway.

This morning I couldn't see the gate at all, so I went off the exit and around toward the park entrance. It was fifteen minutes past their opening time. I was behind another vehicle who turned into the park drive and then immediately did a U-turn. Ah, so the gate must be down.

I didn't want to turn in behind the guy making the U-turn. I went straight down the road and went right into the lane of some corporate mall. I did my own U-turn around the little island with the mall sign ready to go left back the way I had come, except... Except four million cars were suddenly on this road from both directions. What is this? This road seldom is very busy, why now?

Why indeed, it must have been opening time in the Corporate Mall for all four million cars were turning in. Finally one lane cleared and something slow came in the other and I zipped out and went on my search for some walking room. Talley, I thought, Talley Day Park was probably open. This is a county park with about a two mile walking track that does a figure-8 around the grounds. It wasn't far, I would zip over there.

Did I say zip?

Not so zippy.

I went up Marsh Road and now I had a nut behind me. This was not a patient driver. She was right on my bumper, which I hate. Then she was kind of trawling side-to-side and I realized she was going to try and pass me on the right, on the shoulder of the road. Oh, no, no, no, I wasn't having any of that. I edged over enough she couldn't. I slowed a bit as well.

We were coming to the intersection where I would turn left and I wondered if she was going straight. I was tempted, if she was, to go straight and further impede her progress up the road. See, that's how angry I get at tailgaters. But I went into the left turn lane after all, just as the light turned red against us. This woman went to the right as if to go straight, but instead she turned into the Pizza Hut parking lot on the corner, crossed its lot, exited the far exit, made a left on the cross street, then a right on Marsh, all so she didn't have to wait for the red light to change green. Say, babe, set your alarm for a little earlier next time!

Now I haven't far to the park. I was driving west (or is it south) on Wilson. I will soon come to a road called Shipley, make a right, go a short distance, make another right on Faulk and then quickly be at the park. I am just beginning my ease into the right turn lane for Shipley when a traffic report comes on the radio.

"Shipley Road is closed this morning between Wilson and Foulk due to a downed tree."

Now I have to go a longer way, but still not too bad. I go straight and eventually Wilson crosses Foulk, where I make a right and head back a couple miles to the park. Won't be long now...if it hadn't been for that sign, "Road Work Ahead" and the flagman on the corner and the closed right lane and all the backed up traffic.

After my walk I planned to avoid the construction on Foulk by turning left and going home the way I had come. No road work on that side. I pulled up in the left lane of the exit drive from the park at the light awaiting the green signal...which never came. I sat there and the traffic on Foulk sat where they were because they also had a red light and then they got a green light and moved and I sat there.

So I made a right turn on red from the left lane. I know, I know, but believe me, there was no traffic coming behind me.

Of course, now I am in the backup for the roadwork with the closed right lane. I use the word roadwork loosely. Yes, the whole right lane and right shoulder were behind the ornate barrier of orange cones, but the work was being done to THE SIDEWALK!

Things off the road were no speedier for me lately. I found my blood pressure elevated two weekends ago. I was in a drugstore dropping off a prescription for my wife and spotted one of those "Take Your Own Blood Pressure" chairs, so I took it. I shoved my left arm through the cuff and pressed the button. The cuff began its squeeze. A little sign said you will have your results in less than a minute. The cuff continued its squeeze. The result windows stayed at zero, unmoving. The cuff continued to squeeze. Time ticked by to the beat of my heart in my pinched arm, definitely longer than a minute. It came to mind I might be in a malfunctioning machine. It would never give me results and the cuff would never release my arm. Perhaps it was a possessed machine in a Stephen King world, one that would soon rip my arm off and beat me with it.

And just as I was considering yelling for help, my results popped up and the cuff released. My heart rate was 66, toward the lower end of the normal scale of 60 to a 100 at rest. But my blood pressure was a tad high. Okay, more than a tad. More like giraffe height. When I got home I called my doctor because my high blood pressure medication was used up and so was the renewal date. The receptionist-phone-answerer-nurse-whatever said she would call them in to my pharmacy. (I take two different pills for high blood pressure.)

This was on a Monday a week ago. On Friday afternoon, after I got home from work, I went to the drugstore to pick them up. I am a bit of a procrastinator I admit. On the way I glanced at my gas gauge. I was below a quarter. Oh rats, I should have got gas last night or this morning on my way to work. I better fill the tank now.

Easier said than done. At the next intersection was my regular service station. Cars were lined up at one bay of pumps. It would be hard to squeeze in that side. The other bay was blocked off by my familiar friends, orange cones. Those tanks must have already been drained. The gas station on the other corner was no less crowded. I drove on.

This is good, I am driving in search of a gas station less crowded. Perhaps I will run out of gas looking for gas. Just to keep my mind alert the radio picked that moment to announce places were running out of gas. I came toward another station, but the traffic was backed up for a red-light and I could not see if the station had lines or not. Closer I came and then stopped, again by traffic and the light. Again closer and stop. Eventually I reached the lot and it wasn't bad. I pulled in with only one car before me at a bay of pumps.

I got my gas and went out on the other road because of all the traffic. I had to go around Robin Hood's barn to get back to my drugstore. On the way I passed the supermarket I often picked up at and pulled in the lot. I wanted to get some soda and perhaps some batteries. As I parked I saw the Wilmington Trust Bank Branch was now striped of any identifiers. This was the great conversion weekend. No more Wilmington Trust Bank. Next week this would be M&T Bank.

I went in one door of the supermarket and right out the other. I wasn't dealing with that madhouse. Why was there so much traffic on the roads because certainly everyone in the county had piled into this supermarket. Besides I could see the battery display and it was empty. I got in my car and drove down the street to my drugstore.

I come in and there is a long line. I guessed everyone was not it the supermarket after all. The rest were here getting his or her prescription refilled before the Hurricane arrives tomorrow. I had never experienced long lines here before. So, I waited and I waited, and I waited some more. The woman before me asked if she could step out of line to sit in a nearby chair. Certainly, I'll hold your place. No sense having people passing out before me, that would only slow things up. Why was it so hot in the place? I could see into the pharmacist's workroom and they had fans set up in there. We were wilting out in line. No fans here. So by all means, dear lady, please take a seat.

Finally I reached the counter and gave my name. The clerk shuffled off to sort through the hanging plastic bags. He went over and spoke to one of the pharmacists, he came back and began searching the computer.

"Did you drop them off today?" he asks.

"No, my doctor called them in three or four days ago."

He shuffled back to the pharmacist, then conferred with another pharmacist, then rechecked his computer.

"We have no record of a call in," he says. "I could call your doctor now if you wish, if he is still open."

I look at the line behind me. "No, that's okay. I'll call her when I get home."

But I couldn't. It was now too late in the afternoon and I wasn't certain the doctor's office was still open. I would have to wait until Monday, after the weekend and after the passing of Irene.

More waiting and more to come...

On Monday, once we had phones again, I called the Doctor's office. The receptionist-phone-answerer-nurse-whatever said she thought she had called it in, she would check.

I waited on hold.

She came back and told me the Doctor had disallowed my prescription renewal because I had not been in for a visit since April of last year. I would have to make an appointment to see the Doctor before she would renew my prescriptions. I made the appointment for the coming Wednesday (which is the day I am writing this). The lady then told me she would call in enough prescription to see me through until I saw the doctor, five pills of each medicine.

The Little Woman and I always go out to dinner on Monday. We usually leave at 5:00. At 4:30 I announce I am going to run over to the drugstore and pick up my ten pills, oh foolish ever-optomistic me, I actually believe I can do this and be back home all within a half-hour.

Traffic was heavy, but this really didn't slow me up greatly. I arrived at the drugstore with still twenty minutes until five. I went back to the pharmacy and what is this a Disney World ride? Today's line was even longer than the pre-Hurricane Friday line. And there were several people sitting in nearby chairs. And it was still darn hot in the place.

So I parked myself behind a lady and I waited, and I waited, and I waited some more. Then do you know what I did? Why, I waited. On Friday two clerks were processing the crowd, but today only one fellow had that joyless job. I admire his good spirits about it though, because there seemed to be mass confusion reigning in the wait area. People seated would get up and come to the line or go around it and call through the window for "Private Conferences with a Pharmacist" to berate someone, anyone to speed it up.

Then occasionally someone behind the pharmacy counters would yell, "Doris, you may get in line now." Wait a cotton-picking moment here, who is this Doris and why is she being paged into line ahead of others? The only thing I can figure is she dropped off a prescription and said she would wait for it.

Now this doesn't seem right. When I drop off prescriptions I always tell them I will come back later, usually meaning in a day or two, to pick it up. I figure I am doing them a favor, giving them time. They usually thank me for this. But if I dropped my prescription off at some earlier time (or in this case, my doctor called it in that morning) why should I have to wait because some Johnny or Jill come-lately said they would wait for theirs. That's like having made a reservation at a restaurant and having them give your table to a walk-in.

And thus I waited. Finally my lottery number comes up and I am at the window. "Name," asks the clerk.

I give it and he shuffles off behind a rack of plastic hanging bags. He then says, just a minute and goes and confers with a Pharmacist. He returns to me.

"We have one hanging," he says, "and the Pharmacist is working on the other. Do you wish to wait or come back later?"

I wish to ring someone's neck, but I say, "I'll wait." No way I am coming back later now.

So I step aside and I wait, and I wait, and I wait some more. He said the Pharmacist was working on my second prescription, did he not? How long does it take to slide 5 pills into a plastic tube? Then at last, someone yells, "Larry, you may get in line."

I step forward, but oh no, this did not mean, "Now we have your pills just come get them." No this meant exactly what was said. Larry could get in line.

Eventually I got my ten little pills in the two plastic vials and was on my way home. Needless to say I didn't make it by 5:00, but no matter, we were on our way to dinner, apparently with the rest of Delaware. Bumper to bumper traffic down the roads. Now it was rush hour and these roads do get crowded at this time of day, but they were more so this night, thus we waited a bit longer for dinner.

But we didn't wait long for service at the restaurant. Lauren was our wait person and had our drinks ordered before we sat down. She knows us well and has extra cherries put in mine. Quickly, my cup of soup was before me. Waiting seemed to be at an end, but there was still the matter of some banking business to contend with and we will get to that next time...if you can wait.

Adventures in iLand: Cops, Computers and Breaking Bad

2011-08-30T14:26:00.000-04:00

Now, about getting the new computer. My old iMac was slowing down, aging like your's truly. I was getting that pinwheel a lot and it was spinning there for an exorbitant period of time. Then the internet would freeze up. I had updated the machine many times since purchased, had installed Snow Leopard not so long ago and now wished to upgrade to Lion. Everything I read of Lion mentioned wireless mouse. I use to be very techno, but have been out of the loop a decade now and I wondered could I download the upgrade and still use my little plug in mouse with its skinny white tail?

So Earlier last week, I went to the Apple Store, three doors down the mall from us. I had been waiting in the hall for one of our managers to arrive with the key. It was a little before nine. I was eyeing the gapping entrance of iLand. The Apple Store always flung wide it's doors by 8:00 AM, often to a long line of already waiting people. A few months ago it had begun hiring State Police to guard it in the mornings. I don't know if this was from mayhem or their. Probably both. One day I arrived at the mall just after the last iPad or iPhone or iPopular-beyond-all-reason Device came out and there were four State Trooper cars across the entrance. I was half afraid to go inside. Was it terrorist? Had the roof caved in? Were gunmen running up and down the corridors? No, Apple addicts were lining those halls waiting to snag the lasted upgrade from the Great Gadget God Steven Jobs.

It's been pretty much that way like that ever since. Apple announces another iThingee and the lemmings come scurrying to wait in line all night if necessary. I think they have more clerks in Apple to handle these hoards than we have customers in our (oh wait, I'm not an our anymore) store in a month, maybe a month of Sundays. For a long period these lines were made up of Asian-Americans. These were people obviously long accustomed to waiting in lines. They came equipped with tiny chairs and stool on which they could squat for hours. It mystified me where they were coming from because I didn't believe we had that many Asian-Americans in our little state. It was explained to me they were car pooling down from New York to escape the high New York sales tax. For what they saved in sales tax they could buy a few extra of these iDevices.

Anyway, on this particular Monday morn I ambled down to the Apple Store. There were no lines that day. It must have been a lull in product announcements. There was a State Trooper however, standing stiffly just inside the doors. Beyond this sentinel were wall-to-wall Blue Shirts apparently assisting customers. I asked the officer if the store was open.

"It's open to people having appointments," he said authoritatively in that clipped way cops and military sergeants speak. "The store opens at 10:00. Can you come back at 10:00?"

"Yeah, I can come back later. I just had a question I wanted to ask."

"Is it a simple question, sir?"

"Yes."

"If it is a simple question, go ahead in. Ask those three guys sitting there." He pointed to three Blue Shirts at a center table.

Simple question? I am sure those three Blue Shirts considered it a stupid question, but I asked anyway and was told that I could indeed use my plug-in old mouse.

So when I got home that evening, I went on the old iMac to download Lion. I am not totally bereft of good sense yet, so first I clicked on "system requirements".

Mac computer with an Intel Core 2 Duo, Core i3, Core i5, Core i7, or Xeon processor. Okay, got that.

OS X v10.6.6 or later (v10.6.8 recommended). Yeah, I;m fine there.

7GB of available space. Sure, no problem.

2GB of memory. Dum-de-dum-dum! Problem. My iMac only had 1.8GB of memory.

I guess I'll live with my Snow Leopard. I didn't have enough memory to change its spots.

So I go to work on Thursday and I look at next week's schedule pinned to the board and I have no days after my name. Hmm, I had seen a schedule lying on the office desk on Wednesday that had me on for Monday, Thursday and Friday. What happened?

So I asked.

My Manager said, "I need to talk to you about that" and I knew what that meant and if you read my last post, so do you.

It wasn't a complete surprise or a shock or anything, but you still feel a bit discombobulated when such a thing is dropped upon you. There was a lot of work to do, too, and I knew it would take an effort to do all I would normally do to make everything tidy and neat, shiny and bright; more effort than my last two days would allow and more effort than perhaps I was psychologically prepared to deal with at that moment. But I tried. I really wanted to leave them with as properly stocked back room as I could.

But the sudden change to my life weighed on me and that computer situation nagged at me. I didn't want to go into the great unknown with a computer that might be wearing out. I really began considering buying anew iMac, if I could get credit to do it. I decided I would go to the Apple Store after work and check it out.

I didn't get off until 4:00. Four o'clock was the beginning of the rush hour, a miserable time to be chugging back up good old I-95 from their location. There was hope I could avoid that. I had a 15 minute break allotted to me, in fact, it was supposed to be mandatory: "All employees will take a fifteen minute break under penalty of death or termination because we care. So you better take it."

I never took it. I hate those breaks. What am I suppose to do for fifteen minutes? Pace about looking at the clock being bored out of my mind. If you want a break, need a break, then you certainly should be allowed a break, but if you have no use for one, then get out of my way and let me work. They had another stupid must do, lunch. "If an employee worked five consecutive hours, they must clock out and take a half hour lunch." That isn't the state law or the federal law, that was just a company law. Now if I am working full time and sever or eight or more hours a day, yeah, I want the lunch break. Five or six hours, come on, I'd rather get done and go home. Why clock out and then have to be about the place an extra 30 minutes. And the corporate MBAs were very adamant about it, too. More Moronic, Boobish Activity to justify their getting a paycheck.

I never took those lunch hours either.

But now, under these conditions, that my career would end tomorrow at 3:00, why not take the break?

So I trotted out of the store sometime after 10:30 that morning. I wanted to tell the Manager I was taking my break, but she was on the phone, so I just left.

The Apple Store was a-bustle as usual. Blue Shirts everywhere and customers trying do-dads and gadgets right and left. I walked into the sea of humanity and was immediately greeted by a male Blue Shirt offering to help. I told him I was interested in buying an iMac if they had financing. He said they did, and whipped out his trusty iPad. Well, he didn't actually whip it out of a holster on his hip or anything. he simply picked it up from a nearby table, but you get the picture. Everything was done through that device. he was apparently fairly new to this and had to ask assistance from another Blue Shirt occasionally, but even so, in about five minutes I had my credit and was pointing out the iMac I wanted.

"It does have Lion?" I asked.

"I don't know," he said. "when they bring it out we can check. Some do and some don't. If it doesn't we will install it for you."

Someone toted the box out from a back room and plopped it at my feet. He asked about Lion and no, this one didn't. No biggie, they would install it. So we completed the transactions and he took me over to a Customer assist desk and introduced me to a young Blue Shirt who would handle the install.

"Shall I just leave it and pick it up later.'

They looked concerned. "Oh no, said the Customer Assist Blue Shirt. The customer must stay with the computer. It'll take about 45 minutes to install Lion."

"Okay," says I. "Just let me run down to my store and tell my manager where I am."

"I'm sorry, the customer must stay with their computer."

"Well, I wouldn't be away from my computer very long."

"Uh, where is your store?" he didn't say your store, he said the name of the store because that is what I had said instead of my store. You would have thought he would know. We were only three doors down the hall. But then again, why notice us. We had trickles of clients while the Apple Store had lines in the seemingly millions every day.

"It's three doors down," I say.

"Okay," says he, "but you (turning to the sales guy) go with them and carry his computer."

So there we go, out the door and down the hall and over the bridge and through the woods to my Manager, me and my shadow, the Blue Shirt lugging my computer being me. I tell my manager I will be at the Apple Store for 45 minutes and she says okay and me and the Blue Shirt Computer tender traipse back to the Customer Assist Blue Shirt in the Apple Store.

Now I know I was breaking bad. I was certainly at the Apple Store more than 45 minutes. It wasn't something I would ever do, had ever done, in my fifty-plus years of working. I felt and feel bad for my manager for my doing it, but you know what. That corporation tossed me aside in the discard heap because their upper management didn't know how to make a profit in the last five years. I had given them my all and my best and I had a year and a quarter accrued breaks, so overall, I don't care.

I spent some time being instructed by the Customer-Assist Blue Shirt guy and then was turned over to a Blue Shirt gal named Lauren until the install was completed. They had me do it, but they watched over me and paid me attention and helped get things just right. Over the years I have had many a MicroSoft filled PCs and all those times of purchase, I paid and they handed me the box, rather boxes and wires and manuals, shoved me out the door into the cold, cruel world of do-it-yourself techno install. Apple had people who treated me with respect and took the time to make certain my purchase was working and I understood enough to leave the nest. Unlike some companies, Apple seems to know what they are doing.

And Amber and I (the cat in my lap in the first picture) are very perfectly pleased with the new toy.

Freedom!

2011-08-30T07:35:00.002-04:00

Sorry, it seemed much easier to snag a scene from Braveheart to illustrate the "Freedom!" cry than to paint me face, don a wig and re-enact it.

I barely know where to begin for my first posting on my new iMac (more about that next post) and first since we got our internet back. This has been quite a week, very much a "That was the Week That Was" one. In between the earthquake and the hurricane came an event that surely has seismographic effects on my personal life.

I lost my job.

Well, I didn't exactly lose it. I know where it is. Right there where I left it last Friday. The work I did didn't go away...at least, not yet. No, I didn't misplace my occupation in a senior moment, lay it down somewhere and forget where I put it. Officially, my position was eliminated. I suppose it sounds better to say, "Your position has been eliminated" rather that "You have been eliminated", although the latter is more the truth.
Technically, I guess, nothing has been eliminated. I'm still here, although no longer there. the work I did is still there, though. So the work wasn't eliminated, just the position. Now the work must be done by someone who already has another job to do. My lighter burden becomes their heavier burden. They're up the creek with one less oar in the cold water to help row. (There are some hints there, those who have eyes, see.)

It didn't take me by surprise. I was on the bottom rung, stock person. Always the first to go when a company begins tanking. First they come for the stock person, then for the sales clerk, then for the store manager and then they give the CEO a $40 million pension and call it a day. In other words, the people in the trenches, who do the real work, who know the customer, know the product pretty darn well, too, and know what the product lacks, get the boot first. The people who run all these businesses into the ground are never the first cast overboard, when they should be at the head of the plank. Heck, they should never have been whistled board ship to begin with. Most places these days are run by a bunch of MBA (that is a degree in Moronic Boobish Activity) who wouldn't know how to sit down if it wasn't a theory in a textbook written by a person who never sat down. And of course they would miss the chair, because after all, it is only a theory. (By the way, there is another three-letter acronym for CEO, but this is a family Blog so I won't mention it.)

Anyway, they eliminated my position across the board so I'm told. Yeah, that'll save the company, we all made so much.

See, this is what I mean by freedom. I would never have spoken so bluntly if I was working or expected to look for another job. It may be a bit tighter financially, we may have to draw in our belts, but as far as I am concerned I am retired. Now I can speak more freely about what is in my mind. I don't have to worry some one at work will read it and fire me. Oh boy, I've kept a lot of stuff pent up inside me for fifty-plus years. This should supply me with posting for a while.

It is very interesting that I walked in on Thursday and walked out Friday set free. At Wilmington Trust (remember them, around over a hundred years before Moronic Boobish Activity did them in) I got told on a Wednesday and was out the door on Friday. That event was almost exactly 10 years ago. My current ex-employer missed that anniversary by 10 days. I was lucky in a way. Everyone else I saw get terminated at WTC was escorted out the door by security on the day the axe fell. I was asked to stay about for two more days and walked out at the end alone with my dignity. Both that bank and this company harped a bit on loyalty. Where is the loyalty when they cast you aside like a damaged glass vase. If I had quit, I would have always given two weeks notice. I would be considerate, which of course the Corporation would expect, although consideration is a concept they don't understand when it is expected of them.

But don't think I am upset or unhappy with this turn of events. Remember, freedom! I've craved this freedom for such a long time. So here it is and I m adjusting. You may see a different tone going forward, but hopefully I will still write in good taste and Christian love.

And let me tell you, my direct boss was one of the best, a wonderful person who deserves better that she has received over the last several years. The people I worked with were all great, too. The problems in the company are not these people, not those who are the faces the public sees and deals with. You gotta go higher to the invisible elite who think they actually know what their doing. I wonder what company they will be ruining next year?

Gates...and I Don't Mean Bill

2011-08-19T16:36:00.000-04:00

When you think about it, life is a series of gates. At birth we push through the gates of our mother's birth canal and at the end someone pushes us through the gates of the graveyard. In between we constantly confront new gates. Some are closed to us. Some are open. When we do pass through one it may be into a great pasture or a narrow chute. Whichever it is, we are always inside a new stockade of regulation or restriction for that is what gates hang on, fences.

Don't think this is so?

Well, walk far enough across your independence and eventually you'll belly up against a wire or rail or picket.

That is unless you are a Bill Gates. Forty-Billion dollars can buy you a lot of open range. Even so, eventually every Bill Gates of this world will have someone push them inside a fence they can't buy their way out of.

But I, like most, am no Bill Gates. I am just an ordinary Joe (or Jill for my desires aren't confined to sex or creed or race) who always craved freedom. I like to think I went my own way, and often I did and have the scars to prove it. You see there are those barricades surrounding the phases of our life. If you are trying to climb up the rails rather than using the designated gate, you're going to be pushed down a lot.

There are, of course, many bad reasons why a fence might have been erected about our lives. Human history is full of people imprisoned behind the rails of prejudice and ignorance. But I'm not specifically talking about social justice here.

Many of these imprisoning pens were entered by choice. We voluntarily surrender some of our freedom when we go to school, take a job, pledge to a life partner, join the Armed Services or enter a movie theater. Enter a movie theater? Certainly, if you are a considerate, decent person, don't you give up your freedom to be disruptive and rude so others may enjoy the film? Yes, I know, some people don't and what do we think of him or her? When we allow that kind of freedom it makes life miserable for us all.

There are fences we stand behind for safety. If the barrier keeps us from standing in front of an oncoming train, it is a good thing. We could demand our freedom, push through the railroad gate and stand in the headlight glare of the streamline limited. We can grab such moments of freedom like standing on those railroad tracks or maybe running red lights. It may be a brief moment of exhiliration and the next gates we stand before will either be the pearly ones or the Gates of Hell.

But now I find many of the fences have come down. Most of these life phase gates I have already passed through. At 70, the gate of age has blown open and I see it as the last great beginning, where I may have as much freedom as I can expect in this world. I have nothing left to prove to you or myself, really. I am pass worrying about promotions and status and fame. I don't have the desire or need to impress anyone. I've seen enough to know most of what they call politics is being played out for the umpteenth time with little change. Oh, the actors may be different, but the lines are familiar.

Yes, I know total freedom will never come. Kris Kristofferson sang, "Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose." I don't want to be that free. There will always be fences somewhere. I still see the temporary, but very close slats of having a job holding me in. That fence will come down someday and I hope there is a vast field of freedom beyond, although realistically there may be other fences being erected as I type. You know, the barbed wire of poor health perhaps.

Nonetheless, I feel more free today than I've ever felt; I am excited about having thrown wide the gate of old age and look forward to this new adventure. I don't even speculate on how big this pasture is, just I have the freedom to explore it.

Death, by the way, isn't a fence. It is a gate.

All photos by the author, except the second, taken by my wife:

Gates in the middle of the trail through Alapocas Run State Park, Delaware, 2010.

Me atop a horse pasture fence, 1968.

"The Gates of Hell", Rodin Museum, Philadelphia, Pa., 2006.

National Cemetery, Gettysburg, Pa., 2005.

A History of Work

2011-08-12T11:13:00.000-04:00

There I am, off to the office in 1953, age 12. No not really. The suit and tie jobs were still in the distant future, although I traded in that bow tie for Windsor Knots. This must have been my "Sunday-go-to-meeting" outfit.

How about the hat? This was the de rigeuer style back then.

I don't remember my first paid "job".

There was a small store on Chestnut Street, just around the corner from where I lived. (The photo on the right is how that building looks today, no longer a store.) It was a mom and pop operation, very akin to what we might call a convenience store today. It sold a variety of foodstuff and other things people regularly needed or often ran short of. It wasn't a place anyone did their weekly grocery shopping, just a place to fill in the daily needs. Early on in my boyhood, neighbor's might call me over and ask if I would run to that store and get them bread or milk or some such item. They would give me a couple pennies or even a nickel for my trouble. Pennies could actually buy things in those days, they had real worth, even if sometimes I blew it on wax lips.

So I suppose you could call that my first job.

I had a number of chores at home I was expected to do, wash the car, mow the lawn, help weed the garden when we had one and keep my room clean and neat. I hated those first three and was a dismal failure at the fourth. I had one chore I loved, taking out the trash.

Things were not like today with all our many restrictions and fears. There was less waste and there was a kind of a priori recycling. You didn't throw anything away until it was beyond recognition, let alone use. Clothes were patched and socks were darned. When you found yourself patching patches, then the item became a dust cloth and beyond that use it was a rag for the Ragman. Yeah, there was a Ragman who came about the neighborhood and took old rags.

We lived in a town bursting at the seams with paper mills (almost all gone now) and our used foolscap and magazines went to paper drives and back into the hoppers of these plants. Soda bottles and such were collected by we kids and returned to the store for a couple cents deposit. Garbage, real garbage, potato peels and apple cores and table scraps went to the curb in iron pails. The Garbage man took the contents. You knew when he was coming since you smelled him two blocks away, maybe even across town on a hot summer day if the rotting pulp from the paper mills didn't overwhelm all other scents. He drove an open bin truck. The refuge from our plates went to the slop troughs of the pig farms.

Ah, but there were some things not gathered or collected by others and this was the trash, mostly odd papers and boxes. This was the trash I had responsibility to depose of and how I enjoyed it. You see, it was burnt in large steel 55-gallon drums. Just about everyone on the street had their drum and from it regularly waifed a thin white smoke of burning trash. What made it attractive to me was I got to play with fire.

Here I am (back to the camera and wearing my motorcycle hat) with friends finding other uses for those 55-gallon trash barrels.

But those were household chores, not paying jobs, unless you count my quarter allowance. Oddly, as much as I hated doing most those at home, I jumped at the opportunities to do these things for others. I would mow a lawn, wash a car, even hoe a garden for a fee. I would solicit from a neighbor those things I tried to duck out from at home. So I guess they were my first employments.

I was in elementary school when I did those. I was also in elementary school when I became a professional writer writing, publishing and selling a newspaper ("The Daily Star," although it came out weekly) with my buddy, Stuart Meisel. We charged a penny a copy. We did make money. We were very successful.

Newspapers were to be important in my early "careers". When I moved from Grade School to Junior High I also moved to more regular employment, Paperboy being one. That occupation came a bit later and lasted only a short period, although I loved doing it and thought it the greatest job in the world. I kinda still think it was. I guess I'm a strange fish, but one of the things I enjoyed about the job was doing it in harsh weather, pushing on through the snow and battling the rain to keep my wares dry. I could imagine myself some kind of adventurer attempting to get supplies to an isolated outpost in some godforsaken part of the world, such fun.

I didn't like the breezy days or that blowhard Old Man March, no not at all. I could cover up my product from the downpours and hail stones if need be, but if an ill wind got under my pouch papers would do what Charles Brown's kite wouldn't. They would fly, here, there and everywhere.

I took over the route from my friend, Ron Tipton, known today as "Retired in Delaware". He moved on to bigger and better things, I hope, and turned over his customers to me. I had about 100 clients for the daily and perhaps a third less for the big Sunday edition. This was the Philadelphia Bulletin, then the premier Philly rag, now defunct. I was earning between 18 and 20 dollars a week, a lot of money for a thirteen-year-old kid in the early 1950s. That would have been around $148 to $165 today. Dailies cost a nickel and the Sunday paper was $25. I had to split that four ways, a portion for me, a portion for my Supervisor, some for the delivery truck driver and the rest to the owner of the newsstand where I picked up my allotment. I got a penny-and-a-half for the dailies and five cents for the Sunday.

And it only took me an hour a day to deliver. Wow, wouldn't you like to make a $165 an hour today?

I said this bonanza was short lived. Ron held onto his route until after Christmas the year he quit. He wanted to garner those extra-bonus Christmas tips from his cliental. I took over for the New Year, but then my parents moved out of town and in June I was living in the country and could no longer do that route.

I had held other positions in my Junior High days. I had spent a time being caretaker for my friend Stuart's family, cutting grass, watching the place and so forth.

The Meisel's had a large stone house on a good sized lot in the historic part of town. Here is a photo of the front of the home. Sadly, despite attempts by my friend to have the place preserved, it was torn down and apartments built upon the site.

In those times, too, some us walked just east of town and got jobs at the Farmer's Market. The Market was only open on weekends. A lot of Mennonites and some Amish from Lancaster County came down and had produce or meat stalls there. The place was something of a bizarre, selling a little of much, books and boots, clothes and clothes lines, hunting gear and records. It had a penny arcade of pinball machines. The place was our hangout on weekend nights, feeding nickels into those contraptions or making little records in recording booths. I and a friend got jobs one year with a greengrocer. I was not happy. My friend got to wait on customers. I stood in the back behind a tub of water washing celery. I wasn't long for that job.

When we moved from town upcountry, there wasn't a lot of opportunities for a teen. It was still real country then and there wasn't much around. In the summers I got employed on some farms in the area as a picker. I picked tomatoes and I picked strawberries. It was sweaty, uncomfortable work. It isn't called stoop labor for nothing. You either spent the day bend over or waddling up the rows like a duck. You came home sticky, covered with dust, thirsty, stiff and tired.

I plucked plants for the two summers between ninth and tenth, and between tenth and eleventh. On the third summer of High School I moved up and out, getting a job loading 18-wheelers at the farms in Lancaster County. Those Amish boys would gee their horse wagons up along side and I would offload their harvest onto the flatbeds, bushel baskets of tomatoes heading to the ketchup factories in the Western end of the state. The baskets got stacked to just above my head all down the trailer. You have any idea how many bushels of tomato you can stack six high down thirty feet of truck?

I think I got paid ten bucks a load.

That was summertime, when the livin' is easy. The winters were harsh and sparse. I got an occasional gig shoveling snow, mostly the parking lot of a restaurant called Flowing Springs Inn in Kirkwood, about four miles from my home. That was a hit or miss proposition. I only made money when a snow storm hit, otherwise I missed out on earning anything.

That's the Flowing Springs Inn as it looks today, under the name Titus Inn. That enclosed porch was open back then, so I had to shovel it and its steps off as well.

I guess I started those childhood chores for hire when I was 8. I might have done some earlier, but I was living isolated from the world in a swamp for a couple years. So all those little scraping jobs covered about a decade, from the third grade until I graduated high school.

They were the beginning of a history of work. Much more was to come and still is.

Mystery of the Elusive Waterfall: A Frank March Adventure

2011-08-05T21:43:00.001-04:00

Frank March awoke once again determined to find the elusive waterfall, if it indeed did exist. So far it had the makings of a myth, although it made no sense that the trail map would entice people with a nonexistent marking, let alone a picture of a cataract right in the middle of the thing. Look at that representation with those rippling waters and golden fall colors; why wouldn't you want to find it?

And there on the right, just over that red line that shows the boundary between Delaware and Pennsylvania, is the word "waterfall".

Yet after several days searching, Frank had failed to find it. He had wandered up the long hill in the hot rays of this summer's sun (if there was any brownish hues around the elusive waterfall this time of year they would be the cooked and dry leaves wilting in the heat wave).

At least at the top, pausing to regain his breath, he could look out across the valley and see the stone tower that had once been a mystery to him and further along, the great castle on the hill. (The tower is visible on the upper left corner and the castle just right of the upper center.) But he had solved The Mystery of the Stone Tower, so these were no longer of interest. No, now it was the waterfall he sought.

He had tried many of the trails up atop this hill and seen the wondrous sights of the Woodlawn fields, the horses and the corn, but not the cascade. On his last attempt he had wandered along the upper rim of the mount through the woods, teetering on the edge of a gorge along a narrow path and discovered another mystery, which will probably remain unsolved, The memorial to Bud's Billy Goat.

Here deep in the woods sat the broken remains of a tree, some stones piled at its base and upon a notch near its top. Carved and painted into the base the words, "Bud's Billy Goat". At the top of the object was this, a bicyclist and dates. Is this a grave of some fellow's beloved pet goat? If so, this goat lived almost as long as this Old Goat, for it would have died at 67.

Or did Bud crash his mountain bike on this site, a vehicle he called, Billy Goat? But that would have been an ancient bike. Did they even have mountain bikes in 1943?

At any rate, this did not lead Frank to any waterfall on that day.

He had asked a few he met upon the trails during his searches if they knew where the waterfall might be. No one he asked even knew there was a waterfall. Was there a waterfall? It was on the trail map. There was also the story told by a friend, about pausing from a bike ride by a waterfall and quite pond on a hot day, of being temped by the water and finally giving in to the lure and engaging in some skinny-dipping. In this he was suddenly approached by a teacher and young children on a field trip and kept submerged until they finally left and he could slip out and back into his clothes.

On top of that Frank stumbled on an actual picture of the alleged waterfall on some strangers Blog.

So it was Frank studied the trail map and tried hard to coordinate it with the satellite Google image of the area. He determined it was down a path he had eschewed on his very first hike up these hills thinking this trail simply went down into someone's backyard. Now he was convinced otherwise. Thus this morning he set off to find his goal.

He had a sudden influx of working hours and this would be his only free day this week, so despite a threat of rain he headed off, but this was an advantage. After weeks of extreme heat, he would be able to go up the long, steep hill without the beat of the sun. It was cooler today as well. He traipsed with a plan, up that hill, through the woods, down around and by the horse pastures that would bring him to the path he had never walked. Now he did, down its rutted stony way, just to the right of the house below and came to the road.

It was the spot he had noted, where Beaver Valley Road made an odd almost-U-turn off to the right into Pennsylvania while what one would think was its continuation more or less straight ahead became Beaver Dam Road. That name sounded promising, Beaver Dam, for often dams create waterfalls, unless this was an actually Beaver dam made of gnawed down saplings.

Frank crossed the road and on the other side found a trail going up another hill. He went up and up and up, on a wide track edging the woods. Once further up he spied a narrow trail to his right, which entered the forest in what seemed a promising direction.

Suddenly there was a thrashing of brush nearby and a deer ran across the path startling him. It trotted between the trees and then stood stock still between two trunks. It was amazing how an animal of its size could almost become invisible simply by standing quiet. If Frank had not seen where it had run he would not have noticed it at all. It appears in this photo as only a light patch of brown between some trees near the center.

As a boy one of Frank's favorite things in the children's magazines he got, "Jack 'n' Jill" or "Highlights" or whatever it was, were these little photos with a caption: "There are 15 animals hiding in this woods, can you find them all?" This deer was playing that game with Frank today.

There had been a light rain when he started on his trek, now he could tell it was picking up. He could hear the drops increase. The leaf cover was affording him some protection, but he knew much of his way back to his car would be open ground and he would get wet. He hurried on his way.

Now the path curved downward and entered a groove of semi-mud, more a dry wash than a trail. He had to straddle it, walk with one foot on the right bank and the other on the left bank. As he shuffled along there was a loud creaking to his right, then a sustained and violent crash as a large tree gave up the ghost and tumbled over in a dead faint to the forest floor. You see many a tumbled trees about these grounds, but this was a new addition to the corpses arriving a bit too close and fresh for comfort.

Frank continued down the rut, twisting this way and that and then he was at the bank of a stream and across it was a road. He had no intension of backtracking up that woodland trail, but how to get across to the road was the next question. The path came to the water's edge at a rapids. There was no other access across and this one was tenuous, wide spaced wet rocks in bubbling water. Well, nothing to do but risk it.

Frank made it across without so much as a wet shoe, but now what. There was no sign of any waterfall anywhere and he didn't know exactly where he was. He decided to go to his right down this road, following the flow of the stream, hoping it would take him to the Brandywine.

He walked a ways. On the other side of the road, where a hill of forest rose above him, he saw a trail, but not certain where he was he decided not to chance getting lost in a strange woods for some length of time. He continued along the road.

Then, there it was, behind some large rocks, the elusive waterfall. He had stumbled upon it quite by accident. As he stood admiring the dancing waters, he realized all he would had to have done was walk along this road where he had initially crossed and he would have come to this. The hike up the mount and through the dark wood and down the rut was unnecessary. But then where would have been the adventure in walking down a road? He would have missed the deer and not heard the falling tree missing him. Ah, much more fun this way.

He rather doubted this was the waterfall his friend had swum by, though. There was some still water above you could call a pond he supposed, and certainly it was deep enough to swim in, but would one dare skinny-dip so near a public road?

It also brought his mind back to the rain or now lack of it. If it had rained hard, he wondered, how long would his white running shorts have remained opaque. Hmm, that was a consideration to spur him to move on and see if he could find his way back to his car.

He walked further on and finally came to the little park by the Brandywine. Now he knew exactly where he was and it was still a bit to where he had parked, but that was fine. He ambled beside the lovely creek enjoying the briskness of the morn and happy he had found his waterfall at last, when...

What was that white thing across the water? Could it be the Heron he had seen before?

Wouldn't you know it. He had forsaken wearing his glasses today because of the light rain. The drops would have simply clouded his vision, he reasoned. Besides, he has fairly good vision without the specs; however, not quite good enough to focus well on whatever was sticking up over there.

If only it would move, but it did not. Ah, well, another mystery.

(Turn off my music before watching this short film.)