God Did Not Like What He Saw Through Mrs. Hendrickson’s Eyes and My Bottom Bore the Brunt of His Fury, Justly So

 

So, as I was lying there in bed last night, I was thinking of Pedricktown stories. The “why” of why I need to go back and revisit the years of my youth escapes me.  However, every single time I read a post on the Pedricktown Facebook page memories come flooding back. I truly thank the admin for opening that portal to my past.

 

Most of the stories that were coming to mind last night were tied to Ruby’s packing house and/or the Baptist church.  I will leave the packing house stories for later.  Those tales are earthier and deal with teens trying to sort out their place in the world. They are beer, sex and pot infused stories involving a bunch of teenage boys, some itinerate southern crackers and a very big black man they called Tiny who were all overseen by grizzly old man named Mr. Whitey.

 

Because I spent so much time at the Baptist church there are a number of tales tied to that place that have a humorous bent.  Hell, I have a number of stories involving the mental gymnastics I went through each time a visiting pastor would make an altar call.  By the way I am a Lutheran with Buddhist leanings now.  We don’t do altar calls. Period.

 

The following tale does not tie to VBS or BYF or any of the other Baptist acronyms I remember all so well. Vacation Bible School or Baptist Youth Fellowship to the uninitiated. This is more a me versus the monolith that the Baptist Church was in Pedricktown’s consciousness kind of tale.  Truly ‘tis a tale of the church building as part of the places of my youth as opposed to the church community as part of my social story.

 

When I was about seven, maybe eight, I had learned to ride a two-wheeler bike.  For me this was a major accomplishment.  As any of you who knew me as a kid will remember coordination was not my strong suit.  I think I was the last kid my age in P-City to not need training wheels. This lack of coordination was so severe that on a sunny day my shadow presented a trip and fall hazard for me.  I digress.

 

Well, any how I had learned to ride a bike and my father had consented to the purchase for me of a sting ray bike from W.T. Grants in Pennsville. It was purple metal flake in color, had high handle bars and a banana seat.  Once I got it, I rode it everywhere.

 

Well as fate would have it on one particularly sunny afternoon in summer there in Oldmans Township one of my ne’er do well cousins was in town.  My Aunt had dropped both he and his bike off at my grandmother’s house. 

 

During those years my grandmother did a great deal of child care for all of us cousins when our parents had obligations to attend to. This was old America, the one where extended family reached into every aspect of your life. I don’t think there was a town in Salem County where I didn’t have kin who would call my father and tell him they had seen me if they suspected I wasn’t supposed to be out and about.

 

With two bikes and time to kill we went riding together about town. In P-City there are only so many places you can go. You could ride down to the bridge and look into the murky water for fish or corpses.  I think I remember two jumpers from the Delaware Memorial Bridge being snagged by fisherman off that old bridge over the 18 years of my youth.  

 

You could ride up  Railroad Avenue north to the train tracks, boring.  You could ride south down Railroad Avenue past the school and to the edge of the fields, even more boring. Eventually the ultimate magnet of our childhood called us.  Off we went to the Baptist cemetery down at the far end of West Mill Road.  For some reason that place held an inexorable pull on us.  The attraction was so strong you could almost see the waves of magnetism in the air.

 

There was a ritual to the visits there.  First, we would walk over to our Grandfather Asher’s headstone.  He had died before either of us had been born.  According to family legend had been a veteran of San Juan Hill in the Spanish American war so there was always a flag and a metal star that held it atop his grave.  Our Grandmother’s name was also carved on that headstone but she wasn’t dead yet.  It just said 1893-      .  We pondered the why of that. Behind that joint headstone was our uncle’s grave. Neither of us knew how he died. I never got the whole story.  People kind of mumbled when it came to talking about his passing. 

 

After that grave visit we would wander around looking for open graves.  An open grave was a double dog dare kind of thing.  Invariably we would threaten to push each other in.  The terrifying push actually happened once or twice but that was when we were there with a group of cousins. I can remember screaming and crying until one of those sick bastards actually gave me a hand and pulled me out. 

 

Of course, we were looking for the ghoulish and the macabre.  We were always thinking we might see something like a casket in the ground next to the bottom of the open hole.  Yeah, I know it sounds sick and ghoulish but we are talking about being a kid here and more specifically being a boy.  Really, we are talking about that age when you are pulling the wings of flies, frying ants with magnifying glasses and the whole Stephen King Stand by Me kind of behavior that boys do.

 

On one particular sunny afternoon the whole double dog dare thing came into effect and led to a bad result well at least for me.  Could this story be going anywhere else, I mean really did you think it was going to be warm and fuzzy? Nayh.  Boys, graveyards and time to kill, I mean what could go wrong?

 

On that warm summer vacation day my cousin had the bright idea that it would be a good idea to challenge me to ride out bikes as fast as we could through the grave yard.  Cool beans, there could be blood involved. Round and round we went dodging granite markers trying not to split our heads open. 

 

Now as to the sacrilegious and disrespectful quality of this race among the monuments to finality, those hard cold markers of mortality I guess I have always believed the dead were dead and they really didn’t mind. (A number of people have confessed to me since I have left town that they had sex in the Methodist Cemetery.  It was more isolated.)  I mean given the number of people who have occupied this earth before us is there anywhere where you on this planet where aren’t walking over a spot where one of predecessors is now in repose?

 

It is at this point I must note that to my cousin the thrill of maintaining bodily integrity was not enough.  He upped the ante. As boys clearly we had to do something to make the thrill greater. It is here where the clothes start to come off. As the next phase of the grand prix among the dead we continued the ride shirtless.  We did this for a couple of laps but this was still not enough to satisfy the thrill factor.  The following phase of this championship double dog dare ride was doing a number of laps in just jockey shorts and sneakers.  Given how scrawny we were I cannot image this being an aesthetically pleasurable sight to be observed.

 

Still a tighty whitey ride was not enough of an adrenaline rush for my nefarious cousin and I being the sheep that I was agreed to what happened next.  Did I mention that I believe the graveyard sat at was still a five-point intersection?  It was a main intersection of the town. Traffic was going by but we didn’t notice and/or care.  When you are seven or eight you are the entire world.  Nobody else exists.

 

Finally, there we were riding around the graveyard buck naked on our stingray bicycles.  Well almost I still had on my black horn rim glasses and my sneakers.  We had only done a couple of laps when the church secretary came running out screaming at us.  For the life of me I am not sure remember her name, I think it was Mrs. Hendrickson.  She was old to my eyes; she might have been in God’s kindergarten class.  

 

I do remember her stone white hair. While she seemed really old and I am sure my cousin and my behavior added a few years to her aging process.  Normally she was slow and steady.  She was a rock upon which the church functioned. However, on that day she was really pissed off and came out running screaming at us with a fury I could not have imaged.

 

I believe there were words used like “you filthy dirty boys” and “I have already called your parents”.  “God will punish you heathen little demons” might have been said but hey I have heard that so many times when I was hanging around with my cousins growing up it is hard to distinguish one incident of damnable behavior from another.

 

Quickly we grabbed our clothes and beat feet away from the church.  We pedaled our little but now clothed bodies away from that church and east down West Mill Street as fast as we could.  We flew.  My cousin turned in at my Grandmother’s house which was about halfway down the street between the church any my house. He wasn’t sweating.  He knew his mother would a. either not care or b. would never find out about it.  Me, I was in full flop sweat, heart racing, and with boy parts in my chest mode.

 

I had good reason to be.  By the time I got to about where the Titus’s lived (about three houses from mine) I could see my mother standing on the porch of our house and oh did she look pissed.  For all of those who ran afoul of her in first grade, image that her most wrathful look x10.  My memory is of being dragged off my bike and being read the riot act.  One phrase I remember to this day is “What were you thinking, would you take a bath in public?”  Out of context such wording sounds insane, doesn’t it?  But at 7 years old it shook me to my core. 

 

As I was dragged to my room by my collar, I heard the words that no child in his right mind ever wanted to hear. “ You will stay in your room and when your father gets home, he will deal will this.”  “You will be getting the belt”. Yeah, you can pretty much suss out how this ended.  I couldn’t sit for a day or two.  No, it wasn’t child abuse it was just mid-1960s parenting.

 

Did I learn anything from this?  Yeah, the church secretary watches the graveyard.  Also, lots of cars go by the intersection of Straughn Mill Road and  West Mill Road in mid-afternoon.  I probably should have learned that being naked in a public place does not end well.  As you all know that lesson did not stick.

I Found My Thrill...

 I wrote this a long, long time ago.  The piece was published in a blog that FB will not allow me to link to. However, while reading through FB a friend mentioned that she wrote everyday.  I try to write every single day and sometimes it comes out like this...

Neat, mirror-shinny napkin dispensers, each in its own space, each equidistant from the next one, sat on the counter. Formica and white the counter stretched on for the length of the long thin front room of the diner. Between the napkin-holder/condiment stations sat those old jukebox units with metal tabs, tabs you pushed or pulled to move between pages listing song after song.

Round stools of chrome and sticky vinyl covers, a vinyl that made fart like sounds on hot days when you tried to move your butt around to get comfortable were bolted down for the whole length of the counter .The menus rested in little trestle things on the inside edge of the well-worn counter. Wrapped in clear, but yellowing vinyl like your great aunts couch the numbers on the price column had been whited out and written over so many times you ended up guessing what the blurs really added up to. You hoped those crumpled dollars in your blue jeans would cover it.

 

The menus carried the death we all approach so quickly now in all of its tasty component parts. As your read each item you could smell the burger on the grill and catch that hot moist warm odor of the fries in the deep fat fryer coming from the kitchen. The first beverage was coffee. The next was Coca Cola and this was the real thing, the real stuff no saccharine, no aspertaine just vanilla and lots of carbonated sugar water. 

 

Heinz Ketchup sat on the counter along with a squirt bottle of mustard of unknown origin. That squirt bottle with the brown caked cap at the top so yellow that it clearly was not a product of nature's bounty. The service was as quick as it needed to be and if you wanted it that coffee, I mentioned was black and fresh and it didn't require sixteen different directions be given to the server; it was just coffee for Chrissakes.

 

The place was the Fernwood Diner although it might have been the Summit or the Empire or even the Point Diner. A few menu items might change based on the nationality of the owners, but there was always a burger basket, a couple of shakes, the diet plate (peaches, lettuce and cottage cheese) and usually Coke products.

 

The kitchen staff dressed in white. The waitresses dressed in little pale outfits with aprons that were white, black or which matched the color of the outfit but with some frills at the edge. The women were older, always older than I was and they smelled of coffee and cigarettes. They talked fast, smiled (usually) and would crack a quip. Their apron pockets jingled with the sound of tip money. While these ladies might offer a mild double entendre there was no cursing and no overt sexual talk. This was before America threw in the towel and every conversation had to be punctuated by profanity and every line of talk had to end below the belt. You told the filthy joke about the midget the penguins and the Pope out on the steps leading into the diner, but never at the counter. Even then life was earthy and real but it stayed its nasty self outside the door because rules inside were rules.

 

I got to know this diner well because it was where I hid. Whenever I came to visit Muffy in her working-class Philadelphia suburb, I would stay with her in the first floor flat she rented. Her apartment abutted the back of the Fernwood Diner. My gear, clothes and backpack were always stowed out of sight. If Muffy's parents came by for a visit, especially if they came by early, I had to be elsewhere. Thus, when that doorbell rang, I would haul ass out the back door and head over to the Diner.

 

Each time I would go into the Fernwood no matter what time of day or night I would normally order a burger and fries. Normally my visits at the diner would last a half hour or so. Having been hustled out to avoid detection I would get a Philadelphia Inquirer and I would work the crossword, slowly, very slowly. My vocabulary came from that puzzle, it wasn't the Times but it was hard enough. 

 

I would wolf down the burger but I would play with the fries. One fry, one dip into the ketchup and one small sip of the Coke, do another clue. You sipped the Coke in small sips 'cause nobody refilled nothing 'cept an occasional warm up on coffee to regulars for free. Setting down my pen on the folder newsprint I would keep watch out the big glass window that wrapped around the chrome facade to see if the parents' car was gone. No matter how many times this routine happened the Buick would never leave soon enough. Most of the time I would be nearly done the puzzle with the odd five letter word left to finish when I say the car pull away.

 

Each and every time I was wasting another precious moment of life in the diner, I would flip those little metal tabs and move the metal sheets with the little red and white labels identifying each song, artist and B-side until I had seen them all. There would always be a couple of current songs, like Elton John's Mona Lisa's and Mad Hatters or Rocket Man. And there were a bunch of songs like Aretha singing Respect or Chain of Fools. CCR was also heavily represented.

 

Tucked on each of those metal pages were some classic oldies, Charlie Brown, some Fats Domino and Gene Pitney. It was weird it was like the juke box was trying to be all things to all people. If my visit were later in the day, I would play Credence or Elton or something else with a good solid beat. Kids my age 18 or 19 would nod their heads along but I could see the staff was just tolerating it. Most of the time during my exile I just didn't play anything, hey a dime did not come easily out of my pocket.

 

One morning and I think it was a Saturday. I mean it probably wasn't a Sunday because almost invariably I would already be hitchhiking back to Michigan on a Sunday unless I had gotten a ride back lined up off the ride board on campus. Usually this didn't happen because Philly was six hundred miles away from East Lansing. Well, anyway the parents showed up early and unannounced. Tennis shoes, t-shirt and jeans no socks and maybe commando in the underwear department I bolted for the diner. Luckily, I had some money in my pocket. For a change I made my order wrecked eggs and zeppelins with liquid sunshine. And there was some loose change.

 

I flipped that dine a couple of times weighing what kind of nasty looks I would get if I played something on the jukebox at 8:30 or 9:00 a.m. Finally, I just decided to say screw it and dropped it in the slot. I was committed now but what to play. The pages went back and forth five or ten times. Finally, I opted for an oldie. Punching D-9 I picked Blueberry Hill. What happened next was surreal. 

 

As the song began to play one of the waitresses was heading into the kitchen. From where I sat, I could see the guy washing dishes and the cook and another guy who seemed to be doing some prep. As the song got to about the third word all of these guys started to sing and dance. True story it was like watching Frankie Avalon, James Darrin and Bobby Rydell all singing along and doing their best moves in prep for their next Bandstand appearance. Well except these guys were fat, middle aged and wearing soiled cooks’ whites. Every time that door swung in or out these guys were singing in dancing and cutting up stuff and flipping eggs and whatever. The waitresses were singing too, on key and with a lilt in their step. It was clear that this had happened before, many, many times.

 

Me I just put my paper down and took it all in. Hey I don’t know why, but it was an amazing moment. All these people doing this little bit of musical theatre for themselves for whatever reason and being in a good, nayh great mood for two minutes and thirty-eight seconds. 

 

Maybe it was just that song. Maybe they had a shared experience and the whole thing was tied to someone that was now gone. I don’t know I didn’t ask and nobody volunteered. When the song ended the dancing stop and the magic moment ended. A couple of minutes later and the parents pulled away. I left some coins, paid at the register by the door and left.

 

I think this memory sticks with me because it was unexpected, unique and surreally beautiful. I could go into a hundred diners and play a hundred oldies and nothing like this would ever happen again. But it did happen that day when I was at loose ends and my ten cents put it into play. Serendipity?

A Long Time Ago in a Universe of Hedonism

 

May 1975.  Me, I was a freshman at MSU.  It was spring term and we had survived the big snows and the big, big flood. With the year drawing to a close MSU Pop Entertainment was putting on one more big show.  Truth be told this was the show I had been waiting for even though I didn’t know it.  

 

My first favorite rock band had been the Jefferson Airplane.  From “Somebody to Love” to “Lather” to “Volunteers” I just ate their music up.  When the band blew up and pieces parts comingled with the Grateful Dead, David Crosby and a slew of other San Francisco bands to put out the one-off Jefferson Starship “Blow Against the Empire”, I just about lost my mind.  God, I loved the whole sci-fi themed long player.

 

Eventually an actual band formed under the name Jefferson Starship.  With the three main vocalists from Airplane, Slick, Balin and Kantner back together they took it on the road.  Pop Entertainment’s spring show was this version of the Jefferson Starship. Oh, how I remember that concert.  

 

I am not quite sure on this part of it but I think I was hoping to get my roommate Nate to go to the show so I had bought an extra ticket.  However, for some reason he wasn’t using it.  I tried to get other people to buy it but they we all demurring. Looked like I was going to have to eat the cost of the ticket, $6.50, a great deal of money in those days.

 

During this period, I would occasionally talk to my good mate Larry who was in NYC on a work/study gig from Drexel University. Calling late night, to avoid the brutal early evening Bell system long distance rates, I was bemoaning the situation.  As I was talking to Larry on the telephone about how I was stuck with an extra ticket to the Jefferson Starship show, I said I wasn’t sure what to do.  Larry, always the practical one (Ha) told me not to sell the ticket, he would fly out from the east coast and we could catch it together. Way cool.  

 

The concert itself had moments, from what I can remember of it. A friend of mine named Darvon had baked some brownies and given a couple to me.  Larry and I wolfed them down before the show stems, seeds and all. By the time the Starship hit the stage, we were flying along right there with them in the reaches of far space.  

 

The opening act was Michael Quatro, Suzi’s little brother.  Mr. Quatro was an arse of the highest magnitude.  In the first song of his set, he used flash pots so bright that just about everybody in the audience was temporarily blinded.  I think I still am seeing purple splotches from the damage to my retinas.  When the fiery white phosphorus explosions went off you could hear a collective yowl of pain from 6,000 voices.

 

The main act delivered making the pain worthwhile. The Jefferson Starship played all the stuff off Dragonfly and some of the stuff off Red Octopus.  Great set.  Toward the end of the show, they sang “Have You Seen the Saucers”. I remember that one because the house lights were up and the band was playing and singing with such kinetic energy it could be barely contained.  Encores used to be like that. Somewhere in the middle of the show Papa John Creech fell off the stage and had to have his ribs wrapped.  As a result Paul Kantner launched into a profanity laced tirade about the stage hands.  Still, the band gave it their all.  

 

After the show Larry and I kicked around ideas about where to go and what to do next.  We talked about the Kentucky Derby. Back then airline fares were regulated and a round trip ticket to Philly cost $73 barely more than a flight to western Kentucky.  At that time, I had a romantic interest on the east coast. Thus, I wanted instead to go see somebody in the City of Brotherly Love.  Churchill Downs and the Derby fell by the wayside.  We tried to call first the young lass first but I think we got an answering machine. Not even knowing if she was there, we headed off.  Too much pot in the brownies will lead to rash decisions.

 

When we arrived in East Lansdowne, we knocked on the front door and I remember her beating on me/us saying she was supposed to be somewhere else but given the call she knew something was up.  She kept repeating this mantra, “You two are crazy.” I really don’t remember what we did in Philly when we got there.  I don’t think it was the zoo visit because that one started in Fairmount Park and went way sideways in the zoo's aviary.

 

But I do remember the flight back.  Again, this was the time of airline regulation and airlines had to honor their commitments to service small airports. At best there were about 8 people on the plane and the stewardess asked me if I was hungry because they had way too many chicken dinners for the number of passengers. I said I sure was and at the end of the flight she gave me at least 16 chicken dinners.  If you are old enough you might remember getting served a couple of pieces of fried chicken on a Melmac plate wrapped in Saran Wrap on a United Air flight.

 

Before I left Philadelphia, I had called the guys from the dorm to tell them when to pick me up at the Lansing International Airport.  I am joking about that International part.  The guys from the dorm who had heard about this insane trip I has just taken, came over in a big assed ancient Olds 88.  One guy came in to greet me as I got off the plane and he walked me out to the parking lot.  Sitting there in the lot like a metallic monster the Olds with its dome light on was bleeding ganga smoke out through it windows and metal seams.  I think there were six of us when we all finally crammed into that car.  The MSU scholars had come equipped with a baggie filled with pot and a couple of quarts of beer.  Yes, I know now I shouldn’t have gotten in.  Back then I was immortal.  Back then I was young and I was foolish. Besides a cab would have cost me an arm and a leg.  So, I did and off we went.  

 

Between the weed and beer, the lads were hungry and not a single one of those chicken dinners made it back to the dorm. Yeah, it was a peak life experience. Yeah, times then were different.

Church Bells, Blue Hat - - Another Day Goes into the Books.

 

Look around, and quickly get into trouble.

Had to go to Brico Marche again yesterday. Oh, my walk to this fine hardware store was occasioned by the need for two metal washers.  Why did I need washers you may wonder?  

 

Furnishing this place has relied in equal parts Ikea and Francie’s scouring FB Marketplace for stuff like irons, toasters, etc.  As a result of her efforts, we have acquired a variety of appliances and one really cool chandelier. Early on we purchased a small ‘Weber-style’ grill on Marketplace.  With our first guest coming today it was kind of import to get loose ends taken care of and assembling the grill was definitely a loose end.

 

These Marketplace purchases are made kind of like what dope deals were handled in the 1970s according to what I have been told.  You set up a place on neutral ground hopefully near a metro stop and you bring cash.  Sometimes the item is in its original packaging, sometimes not.  You are given a quick moment to inspect the item.  Then you hand over the cash and you head down your respective paths from the meeting spot.

 

What we got from the seller of the grill was a large cardboard box. Inside were the assembly instructions (thank goodness there was an English version amongst twenty other languages) and all of the parts to assemble the grill save two washers. The two small metal rings were needed as part of the handle assembly for moving the grill from one spot to the other. Off I went to Brico.  Thankfully, the parts were there.  Mission accomplished

 

Walking home I began to think about the reality of Portugal as a country filled with churches.  Almost at every crossroads there seems to be a parish church.  In the cities, some cities like Braga and Guimaraes, there are so many churches.  At Braga the bells are constantly ringing, it seems like each carillon is set to its own unique calculation of the time.

 

This country of churches thing crossed my mind as I walked through a park, and then down the broad avenue, both of which I must traverse to get home to my apartment. Passing in front of stores and outdoor cafes I thought it sad that I never heard church bells in a country filled with so many churches.  

When I got home, I assembled the grill.  Putting that thing together was a bugger. Poof, fifty minutes of my life gone and a new array of curses created by the blending of old familiar compound profanities with the word waffle. I am not good with printed instructions as you can see by this photo of an Ikea step stool I tried to assemble Monday.

 

At 6:30 pm (1830) I rolled the grill out onto the deck.  The sunlight was golden as I moved it into place.  Lo and behold the bells of Sao Sebastiao were clearly and distinctly starting to chime. Those chimes were quite lovely.  Me, I took this as a reward for faith and perseverance in putting together that darn grill. Hearing those bells peals erased a sad longing for me.

As to the blue hat.  When you wander about the city people know you are American.  They just know.  Part of this is probably attributable to our weight.  Part of it might be due to the fact that there are very few 5 feet 10-inch-tall women in this city.  Part of it is also clothing. The fabrics here are different.  The styles are different.  The colors are different.

 

Over the past month the average daytime high temperature has been hovering between 55 and 60F.  I wear a down west and a hoodie or a sweatshirt and I am comfortable.  Nobody here has a down vest, they all have puffer jackets, long wool coats or parkas. The down west just stands out screaming, “He is not from here.” About the only thing I have that seems possibly in step with local fashion are my Merrill Moab II shoes.

 

Well Monday night Francie and I went to look for some odds and ends at the local department store.  We didn’t find what we wanted so we decided to wander about.  I asked for a trip to the men’s shoe department.  Herringbone parquet floors are visually striking.  However, these interlocking pieces of highly polished wood are rather cool on my bare feet in the morning.  I was looking for slippers that might fit my really high arches. No luck at the price point I was willing to accept.  We turned to go.

 

There it was, the promotions table filled with scarves and fedoras.  Grey, black and blue fedoras were arrayed so as to catch the eye.  I picked up the blue one almost instinctually. Dropping it on my head and turning toward a mirror I knew I would be making a purchase.  

 

For whatever reason blue is a very common color worn by business people is this part of Lisboa.  At a seminar I attended two out of four speakers wore blue suits.  When I met with a banker on my initial visit here, he was wearing a blue suit. Putting those facts together with the sheer number of fedoras I see worn out and about at rush hour, it just seemed purchasing the hat and dropping it on my head was a natural first step to my fashion integration with Portugal.

 

Now the next day I was sitting in the self-serve lavandaria wearing my hat and drying a bunch of towels to ensure our guest wouldn’t be bothered by our cooties. An elderly gentleman approached me from off of the street.  Speaking rapidly in Portuguese he attempted to sell me a set of kitchen knives he had pulled from under his coat. Think what you will but I think it was my hat that cued him that I might speak Portuguese and might be interested in his knives. 

Ritual and Guilt, Got Little Time for Either

 

Guilt is a bothersome thing, especially guilt over something that is neither mandatory or required.  Setting out on this move for Portugal I was cocksure that I would be able to set a routine incorporating writing every single day.  There was to be coffee, a bit of breakfast, (whatever I might conceive that to be), a brisk walk and then my ass in the chair and my fingers on the keyboard.  Nope, it has not worked out that way.

 

When you retire, you don’t want to do the things that you “had” to do during your “productive” years.  Alarm clocks become anathema.  Rituals are disdained.  Feeling obligated is distasteful. So, the whole get up and walk, drink some joe and pound away at the keyboard thing isn’t quite as attractive as it sounded in the abstract.  Yes, to some degree writing is fun, but doing writing of any worth is also work. Work, blech!!! 

 

Oh, and the time just slips away so easily. My own time gets frittered away with trips to the hardware store mostly.  When you rent an apartment in Lisbon you get a plain vanilla box as we used to say in the construction attorney trade.  There are no major appliances, no furniture and no light fixtures.  Do the list in your head, beds, fridge, washing machine those are the lowest tier on the expat’s hierarchy of need.  Then comes scouting.  Where are the grocery stores, the markets, the laundries and the cheap places for a quick bite when you are exhausted from runs up and down the metro to get the perfect whatzit to do that thing you gotta do?

 

Once you get that stuff done then there is the language acquisition.  At night I listen to podcasts on words you need to know at the store, the restaurant and the doctor’s office.  These are matched up with simple verb forms.  Rolling one’s Rs is hard to do correctly. Hard?  It is really hard.

 

Occasionally there is the social outing.  On Sunday we went to the carnival parade in Loures. It started late, so what else is new here in Portugal?  And then it just kept going and going and ….  Men in drag, people dressed up consumes that ranged from cheerleaders to sailors to spools of thread marched around in a big square for hours.  Each blasting on a whistle or singing along to pop songs blasted through the whole town on ginormous speakers that would have given the Grateful Dead’s wall of sound a run for the money. 

 

Carnival is a big thing here. So big that Shrove Tuesday in Portugal was declared a holiday.  I don’t know whether it has been an annual tradition to declare Shrove Tuesday a holiday or if after multiple years of limiting the partying of carnival due to Covid-19 the country just wanted to let it loose.  

 

Finally, there are the disruptions from America.  Never would I have dreamed that East

 Lansing, MI, the land of beer bongs, football games, good basketball and higher learning would be the site of an active shooter killing three people for no decent reason whatsoever. Never would I have expected my middle of the night would be spent calming my adult children who are still in East Lansing. When people see our MSU garb they comfort us and tell us those things don’t happen here.

 

Today is to be low key.  We have a chandelier to be installed.  We might visit a framing store for a recently purchased painting.  There is a purple flowering plant that is calling out to me from a garden center a little way up the metro.  Oh, and the blue wall needs a second coat.

 

Who can write with all that going on?

 

The song below is from a compilation record from years ago that I believe raised money for AIDS research. The tag line is truer for me today than it ever was before.

 

 

Thursday Afternoon Report from Lisboa

 

 Not my cars, Not my monkeys.

 

23 February 2023

 

Air got cool and windy today.  No rain though.  If you stayed on the sunlit side of the major avenues, you were warm enough with a sweatshirt and a light jacket.  At least that was enough to keep me warm. Again, people here were wearing parkas.

 

I didn’t range too far afield today.  Picked up a new monitor and as I was installing it a cable tipped over my coffee cup.  Dirty brown water everywhere on the desk top.  Grabbed a bathroom towel, it was nearby and the situation was dire, set out sopping up.  Having wiped all this decaf coffee up with a super fluffy absorbent towel I felt inclined to wash it and whatever other laundry was about. Given the coolness of the air I had not planned to wash today but there really wasn’t any other choice.

 

Luckily the monitor nor the guts of the computer got wet.  Mostly there were a few drops here and there on the equipment and I got to the big puddle on the desk quick enough with the towel to prevent real disaster.  

 

Why a new monitor?  Hmmh. Well, old eyes suffer using a small laptop screen, they just do.  Now I have the monitor hooked up and it is so much better for the blind as a bat geezer that I am. I also have a wireless keyboard and it makes the experience just so much easier. Maybe I will write more.  Maybe, it could happen.

 

So, after I got everything set up and posted some of my black and white photos on Mastodon, I took the wet load of laundry to the self-serve lavandaria. Like most people in Portugal, we have a washing machine that takes 3 hours to do a load of laundry. But, also like the majority of the population here we don’t have a dryer except for the cloths lines attached to the back of the apartment and the drying rack we put out on the deck.  When it is too cold to dry things off, I go to the self-serve.

 

Anyway, I dropped my two euros in the machine, the machine gave me two euros and change back and started to run.  Maybe the universe has started to balance out.  This serendipitous turn of events makes up for about four two-euro coins of mine this machine simply ate.  What’s next?  Are long missing socks just going to appear in dried loads of laundry? I will keep you posted as I await the next miracle.

 

Sorry about the bad weather back there.  Hope it clears up quickly.

MSU We Love Thy Shadows

With incredible sadness I have changed my portrait and background pictures on Facebook to the Spartan block S and a view of my favorite place on the northside of campus of Michigan State University. MSU was my other mother as I transitioned from a gangly confused teen to a young adult.  For my generation Michigan State was a place of safety and nurturing.  For my generation it was an island separated from the outside world where we lived in freedom.

 

But there are no places of safety left in American schools at any level.  There is no freedom left from gun violence, from active shooter alerts, from mourning the dying left bleeding out in ivy covered buildings and on the green campus lawns of college and universities. 

 

Despite America’s ongoing and seemingly growing cycles of violence and regret, there is still what seems to be the ultimate freedom of American culture, the unfettered right to buy, possess and use guns and ammunition. From kindergarten children to young adults at college, we see the deaths daily. As Americans our vision of this horror grows quickly hazy and we just move on without trying to make it stop.

 

The Second Amendment was never intended to take a position higher than all the Ten Commandments by our founding statespersons. But we have let the meaning of this “right” be warped over the years to an anything goes stance with regard to more powerful and more deadly weapons. A powder horn and a muzzle loader owned by a family on a farm are not the same thing as large capacity magazine and an AR-15 owned by an urban dweller.

 

It is time for change.  Maybe we need to redraft the Second Amendment to reflect the reality on the ground in American to allow rational restrictions on gun ownership and use. We can’t keep doing nothing.  Offering thoughts and prayers my friends after the fact, well that is doing nothing with a capital N.

 

I did not receive a call last night telling me something horrible had happened to either of my sons.  No parent should ever have to get that call. Ever.   I did however spend almost all of last night talking to my sons in East Lansing from five time zones away counseling them on how to make their home as safe as possible. I stayed on the phone with them trying to keep them calm as the world around them was turned into the chaotic madness gun violence generates.

 

My Spartan heart is broken and my eyes are filled with tears over the horror in East Lansing.  Things have to change. We have to make them change.