I'm NOT Loving It

I'm of two minds about this, which I will explain later.

Don't you just admire the razor sharp minds of the rich businessman, always looking for ways to do good. I mean what could do more good than jack up your profit by taking Thanksgiving and Christmas away from your minimum wage employees. Why should people be giving thanks to God and enjoying the company of their families when they could be out flipping hamburgers and contributing to the coffers of a big business? Why should they waste time watching the wide-eyed small fries opening their gifts from Santa when their are French Fries to fry?

It is my hope that Mr. Corporate Head slipped on a apron today and went down to the local Scottsdale restaurant to lend a hand. Surely when he calls for 18,000 to give up their Christmas we wouldn't find him sitting sipping a nice Bordeaux from his private wine cellar in front of one of his three fireplaces or perhaps watching Dicken's Christmas Carol being screened on his home theater.  Gee, I wonder how long it'd take the cashier at to save enough to buy a $2,175,000 home on a golf course. Maybe if she or he put away the overtime for working the holidays...of wait, a lot are being asked to work without any bonus pay for a holiday.

Now I said I had two minds about these food joints opening on Christmas. Some things are necessary to open all the time. My daughters worked today, Christmas, at an animal shelter because animals need to be cared for everyday. My friend worked at the hotel where he is employed today as well. Of course, in their cases, they volunteered for the duty and they also get paid a bonus for it.

People have to work in hospitals and nursing homes and police stations and other such places. They is no good reason on earth why a Target or a Walmart should be open on days such as this though. People don't die because they can't shop for one day.

Restaurants are a bit more tricky. I remember thinking about this when I was very poor many years ago. Those were the days I use to wander from trolley stop to trolley stop in Philadelphia looking for dropped change so I could buy lunch. I remember walking the deserted city streets on Christmas Day and seeing the restaurants and grocery stores and delis all dark and closed. I wondered where some of the lonely people went to eat on the holiday.

You have a family or friends and a home to go to Christmas is a cozy and bright day. If you are old and alone or down on your luck they may be no such place. It would at least be nice to find a cheap place to get a meal.

But the workers working such places should be volunteering for the duty and getting paid a bonus rate. So my suggestion here, as long as Mr. Corporate Head has assumed the role of Ebenezer Scrooge, is he play it out to the end, when Scrooge saw the light and sent the goose to poor Bob Cratchit. If you open on Christmas, then take the excess profit over a normal day and donate that to some local shelter. And even more, during the day bag up some of those burgers and fries and fish fillets and take them out to the homeless and the joyless and the old couple who can't get out of their apartment anymore.

But that will be difficult to achieve when you keep your heart in your pocketbook.

We All Must Do Our Part to Save the Sinking Ship

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 company struggles to regain its footing in the women's retail market.

On Tuesday, a day before the company announced 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 fiscal 2009 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?

A History of Work

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.

Desperadoes

Over Christmas of 1949 my family moved from the isolation of a swamp into a town. After the Christmas-New Years vacation ended, I resumed third grade in a new old school. I put it that way because I had statred in that school in First Grade, but we had moved away half through that year, so it was an old school for me, but by now also a new one. I was starting over again and was very much the oddball, the hick, the country bumpkin as far as most of the other students were concerned. That is my Third Grade picture on the left, but I am not certain in which school it was taken.

I did make a few friends in my new situation. One of the first (I did have a continuing friendship with a girl I had known since whenever we can actually know others) was a tall, gangly fellow named Ronald. That is his Third Grade Photo on the right.

Our friendship started as just an exercise in trading comic books, but quickly grew to best friend status. Ron was someone I felt very comfortable around, more so than probably anyone I have ever known. After 61 years, differences and distances, we remain close friends and I insist we do until one of us is a pallbearer for the other.

There really was a third member of this life-long friendship, another boy I counted as a best friend and who also remains so to this day. I met him around the same time as Ron, so we three desperatoes have been a group for a long time. This other guy was Stuart. All three of us were probably something of outsiders in our little town.

That is Stuart in a Third Grade group photo, the boy standing on the right in a striped shirt. Ron is standing directly behind and half hidden by him in this picture.

We hung together through Grade School and pretty much high school, although I moved from town to country in 1956 and it was as often we could get together.

On the right are we standing behind the carriage house behind Stuart's home in 1957. That is your's truly slouching on the left and Ron on the right; both of us using Stuart as a leaning post between us.

Both Stuart and my birthdays were this week, three days apart, so Ron remains very much our junior, since he will not turn 70 until November.

Stuart is the furtherest flung since he lives in Florida. Ron and I both dwell in the wonderful state of Delaware, me at the top and he at the bottom. Right now we are making plans to all get together in Philadelphia next month. This should be wonderful.

I supposed the years have made some changes to our appearance, but not to our love of each other.

Last week, Ron invited me down to his place and a visit to Rehoboth Beach. It was his birthday present to me, much appreciated too. We went to the Olde Tyme Photo Shoppe (not certain they actually spell it this way) and had our picture taken as the cowboys we really are at heart. Here is the result:

Don't we look like we rode with John Wayne?

Here is video of our day. (I suggest you turn off my music player by scrolling to the bottom of my blog and then turning up your speakers.)

Carried Away

Once upon a time about eighteen or nineteen years ago the Old Goat's body began to act strangely. If the body had a separate mind then it had become schizophrenic.

Oh, at first it was little things easily dismissed as fatigue perhaps. For instance, The Old Goat would come out of his office at work, make a little semicircle and walk into a wall.

He felt a bit silly the first time it happened, but when it occurred again he became very cautious of his steps. After all, how many times can one walk into walls before people begin to talk or check your desk drawers for the bottle or worse?

This slight course miscalculation wasn't totally new, although the walking into walls was an added feature. He had been aware of an inability to steer straight when walking down sidewalks. He would sense a drifting to one side or the other and was always making small adjustments not to get too close to the curb. He would kid about it. "I hope a cop never asks me to walk a straight line, 'cause I can't."

Ho, ho, ho, what is it anyway? Are the shoes lopsided? Is it lack of sleep, too much on the mind, aging?

It shouldn't be aging. Eighteen years ago The Old Goat was only in his early fifties and he felt energized most the time, a multi-tasking, go-go-go, always doing something type of guy. He had a good job, a sexy wife and an active social life. And that was probably the whole thing, he was just a bit too active and he was a bit body weary, which sometimes effected his walking, nothing more than that.

Except the little sessions of off kilter were soon joined by more off putting things, like muscle cramps, double vision and attacks by sources of light.

Most people suffer a cramp here and there in life, the usual there being the leg. The Old Goat had those now and again, but this was different. It was becoming a much more than a once a day battle with a stubborn muscle that didn't want to un-tense, plus it was all over his body, his chest, his sides, his neck, even his face.

The double vision wasn't all it was cracked up to be either. It was downright annoying. The Old Goat would come home from a hard day of walking into walls and howling from painful cramps, sit down for a bit of the telly and he would be seeing two televisions, one floating slightly above the other. Or was one floating slightly below the other. It was hard to be sure which was the vision and which was the double vision. It was also very upsetting to not quite be able to focus, especially if a pretty girl in a bikini was on screen.

The eye doctor said there was nothing wrong with his eyes.

Now these things came and went over a period of time you understand. They didn't all slam him at once. The worse was the light attacks. That is, The Old Goat discovered one fine sunny day that he wished for rain, anything but a lot of light. It hurt, really, really, really hurt. He couldn't stand that light. He was driving to work with one eye closed and a hand over his other, peeking through the fingers to see the road. Not only that, his eyes began to feel as if he had half a beach of sand behind his lids.

Naturally he eventually discovered the problem and got treatment. He had Graves Disease and this had led to Hypothyroidism for a while and then flipped to Hyperthyroidism, a fairly rare thing. It had also given him Graves' Ophthalmopathy, a fancy way of saying his bloody eyeballs were popping out of his head. That was what caused the scratching sand feel. His eyeballs were so pushed forward his eyelids couldn't close all the way and his eyes had dried out.


Now we could go in to more of the horrors of this disease and the minutia of the treatments, but not right now. Let's just jump to the chase. He eventually ended up not being able to work and sitting at home under a blanket all day to keep that nasty light away. The Disease had weakened his muscles and he had trouble even walking. It was not fun.


But it did give his best friend some fuel to tease him, the case of the pulled down pants...almost. 


Actually this was not his only embarrassing moment caused by his condition. There was another and here is what they were and how they came about.


After some weeks of being basically a blob of jello kept in the dark, he began to feel somewhat better from the medications they started to give him. One day, he decided to drive somewhere. It has been forgotten what he had set out to get, but that isn't important. What is important is he ventured out of the house for the first time in a long while. He drove his car, which was an old Chevette. The gas gauge did not work in this car. He ran out of gas.


He was several miles from home on a fairly unoccupied part of a particular street. He decided he had to walk the few blocks to a main road where there were some gas stations and get gas. He made it to this road and his first hurtle was he needed something to put the gas in, so he found a store where he could buy a gas can.


Spanking brand new gas can in hand, he went into a gas station where two women were attending the counter where you paid for gas from the self-service pumps. He paid and carried his brand spanking new can to a pump where he pumped, lost his balance and fell on his not so brand spanking new can, that is, his rear end. There he sat, struggling now to get back on his feet. (Remember the disease had weakened his muscles horribly, getting up wasn't easy.)


It ran through his head that the two women were probably already calling the cops about the drunken man buying a can full of gas, obviously a deranged individual on his way to commit arson.


Okay, that was embarrassing moment number one, but no one who knew The Old Goat saw it or knew of it.


However, jump ahead some weeks and The Old Goat was beginning to recover. He was on new medicine and even back to work. It was coming up on Valentine's Day and his wife and he had not been out to anywhere together for a long time. He decided they should go out for the lover's day, and anticipating some after dinner activities along the same line, h put on a very skimpy...how can I put this? Oh, let's just be frank, he put on a very skimpy G-string beneath his pants. No one would know but he and his wife.  I mean, married couples do these things, believe it or not.


So they went to a restaurant they had never eaten at before (it has since closed and I believe been torn down to make way for a mall that is on that spot today). It was called the Longwood Inn or something like that. It was a slightly upscale place. They were seated and ordered drinks. The drinks were brought and they ordered dinner. But The Old Goat had felt odd upon arrival. His head felt strange. He wasn't sure if he was getting ill or not.


He tried to fight it, but it was really bothering him so he told his wife he was going to the rest room and sit there a bit to see if he felt better. He got up and set off, leaving the room they were seated in and entering a second dining room.


The next thing he knew, he was being carried under his arms by the Host and a Waiter. "Did I blackout?" he asked.


They said, "Yes."


They took him to the lobby and sat him on a chair right there in front of lines of people waiting for tables. People were looking at him. At that point, the waiter undid his belt and the top button and began pulling down his zipper.


"Whoa! Wait a minute. What are you doing?" he asked.


"Loosing your pants," the guy said.


"We can call an ambulance," the Host was saying.


"No, I'm fine. I'll be okay. Don't do that."


The Old Goat pushed aside the waiter's hands and then redid his pants. He got to his feet.


"I'll be fine, " he insisted.


He went back to his wife and they asked the waitress to pack the food to go. Once this was done, they beat a hasty retreat and never went back to that place.


His pants got opened and he doesn't know if his little skimpy Valentine surprise was noticed by anyone, but his pants didn't fall down, not that that had never happened to him, just not this time.

Main Street, USA

It isn't the prettiest main street I've ever been on in my life, but somehow it seems a quintessential one. Maybe it connects time between the station of my old age with that of my youth. The road is called The Philadelphia Pike.

When I was a boy I lived along Route 30. That highway had many names- the Lincoln Highway, Lancaster Pike - and it was also called The Philadelphia Pike.

How the ends of our life so often connect.

This is only one small section as it runs straight through town. The brick building with the awnings was an aquarium when we first came here. I bought the kids two salamanders and a frog here when they were little. The frog was named Nixon, because it looked like Tricky Dick throwing his arms up with the V-signs he would make. Nixon had a habit of hopping out of the tank and the cats got him. His fate was worse than his namesake.

They told me at the fish store that salamanders only lived two years, but one lived more than four. When it did die, it dissolved away to a slimy goo when we removed it for burial much like the girl at the end of "Lost Horizons".

Not far down the road from this photo is the Pennsylvania border and beyond it the storage tanks of the Sunoco oil refinery. Across the street just ahead is a branch of the big bank where once I worked until they tossed me out for the sin of growing old, the _ _ _ _ _ _ _   _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _! (Game time, have fun, fill in the blanks, use your imagination.)

Next to that bank branch is an institution of this place, the steak shop. They redid the frontage a few years ago. I think it use to be pretty much that white surface all the way down, but could be wrong.

The memory isn't what it use to be.

I learned how to cook steak sandwiches properly watching the cooks in this place many years ago.









This is one of those roads with a number of fast food and comfort food eateries. Lot of good stuff to nosh that the food police would lock us up for or take away along with salt, sugar and spice and everything nice. They tell us its healthy and we'll live long. What fools! No sense in living long if you can't savor the delicious things of life. That's what makes those people so mean and nasty, they think they know what is good for everyone, but they really don't know what is good. They should be boiled in their own unsaturated cooking oil, the _ _ _ _ _ _ _   _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _!  (Game time again, have fun, fill in the blanks, use your imagination.)

A little further down this very American main street is this small stone building. On first gaze one might guess it is a church or possibly even an old fire house.

Actually it is a school.

It is build of stone.

It is called the Stone School, duh!

It might look new, but it isn't. It was build around 1805. If me math is right that is 205 years ago. And it doesn't look a day over 100.


This wonderful town,  and it is a wonderful, has a lot of history. It used to be a place for millionaires (when a million dollars was real money) and famous writers. There is a lot of community pride and activity and great people.

Just beyond this school you may notice a white house. This building is the Darley House and has its own history. It was the home of Felix Darley.

The home of world-renowned illustrator Felix O. C. Darley (1822-1888). Built in the late 18th century and enlarged several times during the first half of the 19th century, the house was purchased by Darley in 1863 and renamed “The Wren’s Nest.” During his career, Darley illustrated books for Washington Irving, Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Dickens, and James Fenimore Cooper. Two of his most notable works were Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle. Charles Dickens visited here for two weeks during his triumphant tour of America in 1867. The house was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974.

This house reminds me somewhat of a house I lived in as a boy just off that other Philadelphia Pike.



There is much of the past to examine and enjoy in this region, but then there is that old I said was torn down and meant the hope for the future.

Just a bit before we reach the Stone School we can stop and contemplate the future .

What is it we look for on this site?

What indeed.

We'll take a look next time.

Summer in the City

I worked in the city for much of the last thirty years and I use to take walks all through its avenues, parks and byways. Over the last few years, though, I have seldom went into the city. Oh, the Little Woman and I have occasionally went to dinner at a downtown restaurant, but that isn't the same as visiting the city.

Next Wednesday I am forced to go downtown and report for jury duty. So this past Wednesday, since I was off from work, I decided to go into town and see how long it would take if I parked out near the art museum and walked to the courthouse.

I know the first picture in this post doesn't look much like a city. I parked about two blocks from where I took it.

The building in the center blurred by shooting toward the early morning sun is Gallucio's. It is a long established eatery.

The Little Woman and I used to eat there fairly regularly. We really ned to go back again.

The restaurant, featuring Italian cooking, besides being a neighborhood pub, is popular all around and even among the more — uh — elite classes.

There is a certain infamy about its parking lot. A one time, highly connected, well-to-do, and famous murderer use to have sex with his eventual victim parked there.

He was eventually arrested very near my home.

I didn't take any more photos on my walk to downtown. I was more interested in how long it would take me to walk to the courthouse. It took me a half hour to arrive on the main drag of town where I ask someone for the time. (I don't wear a watch.)

I then realized I had forgotten where the new courthouse was.

What a dummy!

I should have checked the address on the summons before I left home.

So I walked over to King Street and thought I will just look for it. I turned to my right and walked all the way to the old courthouse not finding it. I then wondered was it on French. I was going to turn right around the corner and down to French, except the sidewalk was closed. I crossed the street and went down and crossed french, because the sidewalk on French on that other side was also closed.

Since any timing of my walk was out the window at this point, I began snapping photos as I went. I began with St, Joseph's Church.

The church which goes back to 1884, I believe, as the first African-American Roman Catholic Church in the city, has a personal connection for me.  Later in its existence it was obtained by the Franciscan Fryers. Then at the end of my employment by a big bank my boss died suddenly at the age of 47. He was one of the best bosses I had in my working life.  He was cremated and the funeral service was held in this church.

This is the lovely little walk through next to the church.

Not too far beyond the church in the couryard of an office building was the statue of a mother bear and her cubs.

Of course none of this looked like a courthouse.

I took a shot up up Tenth Street. The gray building on the right is the old courthouse, but it isn't a courthouse of any kind anymore.

I was still wondering where the new courthouse was.

There is a government building ahead, but it turned out not to be a courthouse.

I was having some deja vu nervousness taking these photos. A few years back, 2003 to be precise, I had a security guard question me as I was taking photos on these streets.

I didn't want another such encounter.

This whole area is government. The building here is the County Building. I once interviewed here for a job as county auditor.

It was a job I really didn't want because it would have placed me squarely in the middle of the political feuds between the council and the executive.  No thanks.

There is an interesting statue here, a display of public nudity.

I think it depicts the government squeezing the last penny out of the taxpayer.

There is a pretty garden here so I went wandering back through it.

The downtown area where the government buildings are sits above much of the city. You can stand up in that garden and view the hidden city.

These are the stairs that lead down to the hidden city where people actually live.

I have alway gotten caught up in the patterns such structures as these make.

This isn't finding me the courthouse, though, so I turn back to the downtown streets.

There are a couple of ladies sitting on a park bench. I approach and ask them where the courthouse is.

I am a bit leery about approaching wondering if they will think me a panhandler. here I am in shorts, T-shirt and baseball cap wandering about. Why would some bearded old geezer dressed this way want the courthouse?

But they kindly tell me the address and one stands and directs my path, although once I heard the address I really knew where it was and how far off I had been.

I follow her directions anyway and cross the street and cut through another little park.  I have to go up several stairs to the next street, which is King. It is hard to believe for some that this city is built up the side of a pretty steep hill.

A fact I will regret some later.

I gaze down King Street. The new courthouse is about three blocks further along.  I am beginning to remember the building now. I had to drop my daughter off at it when she was on a jury not long after it was built.

I begin walking down King.

There is a hotel, where I have attended differenting fuctions when I worked for that big bank, even put on a show there once.

The hotel has changed hands over the years. I'm not even certain which chain it belongs to. I think it is the Wyndham Garden now.

Just behind it is the Wilmington College.

This is the front of the Wilmington College.

The main campus is in New Castle. I know they have another campus in Dover. The student body is around 12,000 and the mascot is the same as my old high school, the Wildcat.

And just past the college building is the new courthouse where I must report next Wednesday (9/8). So it is nearly three miles from where I parked. I guess I could do that.

I really hate the parking situation downtown and want to avoid it if I can.

Time to head back to my car.

I'll show that next time.

All Up Hill

Okay, so I had found the courthouse and established it was somewhere under three miles from where I had parked. I could do that walk in forty-five minutes. It is supposed to be in the nineties next Wednesday when I must, and I can do that because today is supposed to get to the mid-nineties. Of course then I won't be doing a round trip immediately.

Which means I am now about to walk back that near three miles and I can tell the heat is picking up.

I walk up to the historic district. There is a familiar sign, one I have been seeing everywhere about downtown today, sidewalk closed.

They have had sidewalks and streets torn up constantly since I last worked downtown nine years ago and before that.

I cross over and walk up the other side of Market. This used to be called, "The Mall" and was closed to automobile traffic. A decade ago they opened it to traffic, both ways, again and now it is a bit dodgy crossing the street. Even after several years a lot of people forget it isn't shut off and wander aimlessly into the street without really looking. I really don't know why they didn't keep it car free.

I think you can notice in this picture that the street is going up an incline. That upward incline will be constant from this point.

When I worked in the city this was one of my favorite places to buy lunch, although I didn't get it there a lot. Leo & Jimmy's Deli is another area institution and Jimmy has been a real giving citizen for decades. I believe Leo is dead now.

This was the only place I could get Lebanon sandwiches, piled with Lebanon, sharp cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, salt, pepper and yellow mustard on a large hoagie roll with a side of kosher pickles.

My grandmother used to make a sandwich with those ingratiates for my lunches when I was a little boy, we called it "The Dagwood" and it has always been my favorite.

On the right the lighter building with the flag is the Grand Opera House and The Little Grand. The Little Woman and I were subscribers for a few years, taking in five or six shows a year until the economy went sour for me this past year.

My first time in the place was for the announcement of a new logo for the big bank I once worked for. They paid someone a hundred thousand dollars to design a new logo, what a waste of good money. Then they wasted more by renting this place, hiring a composer to write some original elevator music to go with the announcement and making us all come here to hear it.

The door to the box office.

The little sidewalk posts announcing coming shows.

Across the street from the Opera House is a newer restaurant in town called the Chelsea Tavern. The Little Woman and I ate there once recently and we will go back, it is very good.

Actually there was another restaurant here called 821, but it failed after a few years. It was more upscale in its decor and had a confusing menu. We ate at it once as well, but didn't care for it. The menu was really, really difficult to figure out. It was one of those little-dish-big-dish combo you choose from this column and that column places.

I call this photo the dance because of the positions and stances of the man and woman.

There is this corridor between Market and the street behind. Subscribers of The Grand get free parking at a garage and the garage is located on the back street. You can then walk through here to the theater.

Along the left wall are posters for The Grand shows and on the right are windows for the Chelsea Tavern.

Peeking through a window into the restaurant.

Now we are on that back street and that Monchanin Building where I had both my first and last job downtown is dominating the center. I am going in that direction.

The parking garage I mentioned is on the left.

Further along we see another building where I worked peeking around the corner of the round building. This is where I had my last position with that big bank I was employed by for 21 years before they tossed me for getting old,.

We also see a hint of that other nuisance downtown.

Road construction.

Yes sir, we have a nice blockage on a main inbound artery. When I took this picture one of those distant guys in yellow was yelling at a motorist. See that white vehicle on the right turning into a side street.

He's turning the wrong way into a one-way street.

Oops!

"Hot dang! Summer in the city..."

Dig we must.

The doorway I walked out of for the last time on September 7, 2001.

Hard to believe tomorrow, September 5, will be the ninth anniversary of the day I heard those kind and affection words, "Retire or be terminated".

I had my first interview with an outsourcing firm on the top floor of the tallest building of the city scheduled for 9/11. It was cancelled for some reason.

Here is another popular eatery in town, The Washington Street Ale House.  We have eaten there and liked it, but parking can be a problem so we haven't been there often or lately.

Oddly it looks similar to the restaurant I started yesterday's post off with.

Going to start my exit from downtown now.

I like to walk about this city, but I really am not looking forward to jury duty.  If I were actually retired it would be okay.

But it is going to be costly for me. I only get paid when I work and the compensation the court gives a juror is not even half of what I make, and I don't  make very much to begin with.

Plus my vacation starts the week after I must report and I don't want to spend my vacation sitting in a courtroom.

(I don't get paid anything while on vacation either.)

I pity the defendant if I am selected because I won't be in a forgiving mood.


This picture is called, "letters"

Last time I was called for jury duty that famous local one-time-big-shot-influential-well-to-do-person was about to be tried. I thought I might get on that jury. I worked for that big bank then and they would have paid me while on jury duty. A long trial would have been fine. Not now.

Last photo I took. Usual scene, roadwork on I-95.

I thought I had my lens clear of the fence, but obviously not, so the shot was ruined.

I took no more photos because I had walked a long way and the day had grown hot and humid and it has been all up hill and the hill is about to get steeper and I didn't have the energy left to raise my camera.

I'm not as young as I used to be, you know.