Month: November 2008

Today I am one year older than my father was when he died.  So, I’ve been thinking about him quite a bit. 

My father didn’t suffer adult fools lightly.  He told wonderful stories and he told them wonderfully well, but was otherwise kind of a stern man with adults. 

He was tall, muscular, but very thin and had large, strong hands.  He could hold a sturdy kitchen chair at arm’s length by the bottom of one of its legs and he could do that with either hand.  If you think it’s easy, you try it.  His demeanor matched his appearance. 

Maybe he was stern because he was a police officer.  Maybe it’s because his father died when he was a child and he supported his mother, brothers and sisters from the time he graduated from eighth grade at the age of 13.  It was a different time. 

Because he had both an eight-grade education and a passion for learning, he would have loved to see both of his children get master’s degrees.  I would have loved for him to see that too.  I know he would have loved to know his grandchildren, especially when they were little kids. 

With little kids he was different.  He wasn’t stern at all:  instead, he was sly.  He knew little kids love foolishness and absurdity.  When my sister and I were young children, he would tell us that he was pretty.  We would insist that he was handsome and we would argue back and forth until all of us were laughing. 

After he retired from the police force, he was a school bus driver.  I went with him a couple of times when my school and the one he drove for had different holidays.  Once he stopped the bus with its red lights flashing, making an ice cream truck coming the other way stop too.  He bought me some ice cream and a couple of the kids on the bus complained that he bought ice cream for me, but not for the rest of them.  I guess they didn’t realize we were related.  And I remember him asking a boy in kindergarten at the beginning of the school year whether he was married and what he did for a living.   The little boy laughed and for a while forgot he was nervous about this new thing called school.

He was 11 years older than my mother and he didn’t age well because for much of his later life he was in poor health so he looked older than that.  A couple of the little kids in our neighborhood would knock on our door and ask my mother if her father could come out and play. 

I still miss him sometimes, more often than you would think.

I can’t figure out how to respond to comments made in the comment section of this blog, so I’ll respond when I feel like it in the blog item section.

To Richard, I’ll say that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to fill the portable  hard drive I just got with MP3 music files (not even when I’ve digitized all my Moody Blues albums), let alone consider another hard drive because the one I bought last week filled up with music.

If the entire Billboard top 100 turned over every week since Billboard started its charts in 1955, that would be around 110,000 songs.  It doesn’t, so I’d guess the actual number of songs in the Billboard top 100 is on the order of 20-30 thousand.  I don’t like all of them and I’m not going to try to collect a complete set.

But it occurs to me that computer storage is now so cheap that while having everything is still out of reach financially, having a place to keep everything (at least if everything is digitized) does appear to be within reach.  A 500GB hard drive that fits in my shirt pocket sure beats the equivalent amount of storage in boxes of 500 IBM punch cards.

I had already graduated from high school.  My sister hadn’t yet.  It was Veterans’ Day, just as it is today.   School was closed, but they were holding rehearsals for a school play and my sister was on the stage crew.  My Dad wasn’t feeling well, so he asked me to drive over to the school that night and pick my sister up from the rehearsal. 

In those days, pay phones had been invented, but cell phones hadn’t.  In that school the pay phones could be locked up and they were when I got there.  So, unable to phone her parents to pick her up, a girl I knew named Rita was walking around the stage saying, “Who’s got room in their car?”

I said, “I do, Rita.”

She said, “Good, you can take us home.”  Us turned out to be Rita and another girl named Karen; a petite, cute, blonde girl named Karen.  Rita and Karen were on the stage crew with my sister.  So, three girls and I went out to my car.  My sister got in the front seat, Rita and Karen got in the back. 

I took my sister home first.  She’s four years younger than I am, so I got to stay up later.  At least that’s what I told the two girls in the back seat, neither of whom was willing to sit up front with me after I dropped my sister off. 

Rita told me to take her home next, so I did.  Karen still would not join me in the front seat.  While driving the couple of blocks from Rita’s house to Karen’s, I decided it would be an extraordinarily good idea to go see that play the following Saturday night,  I don’t remember anything about the play.  I may not have remembered anything about the play halfway through the second act.  I had no interest whatsoever in the play. 

But Karen and Rita invited me to the cast party which was at my ex-girlfriend’s house, so I knew how to get there.  In fact, I was the only person driving to the party who did know how to get there, so I led a caravan through town.  This time, Karen did sit in the front, between me and my ex-girlfriend.  In back were my sister, Karen’s friend Rita, and my ex-girlfriend’s best friend, Sue.  I had warned (or perhaps threatened) my sister about sitting in the front seat again.

All this sounds harmless, right?  So why is the tale cautionary?  Well, not right away, but I eventually married Karen.  I’ve just recounted how we met on the anniversary of the day we met.  So, I’d like to take this opportunity to warn all petite, cute, blonde girls to think at least twice before accepting a ride from a strange boy.

I was going to write a blog item about the importance of voting.  But my friend Richard (not Feder) of New Jersey (not Fort Lee) wrote a blog item in which he said voting isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Particularly, he took issue with the often repeated statement:  “If you don’t vote, you can’t complain.”  He’s right about that.  While voting and complaining can be done simultaneously, they can be (and often are) done independently too.

I emailed Richard and he turned my e-mail into his own blog item.  So through the magic of hyperlinks, my work here is done.

And I don’t just recommend Richard’s blog because he was intelligent enough to recommend mine.  Richard and his blog are smart, quirky and often funny.  Today’s item is mostly my writing, but here’s his blog’s index in case you would like to catch up with his writing.  If you do, you’ll learn what a PLUCO is.  That’s a promise!

And here’s my endorsement for this election season.  I think Richard’s blog is worth following.