Left to my own devices

"It's been so long Doing all I can do To get back to you California Blue"    -- California Blue , by Roy Orbison I've only ever flown on an airplane for one occasion in my life. This fact has actually startled people, and I can maybe understand why. We live in a fast-paced, global society. Air travel is commonplace. I, however, have always been deathly afraid of it. "But you're more likely to die in automobile than in an airplane," people always say. True, the statistics bear this out. But, once I'm crammed into that cylinder, along with who knows how many other people, high up in the sky, and something goes down, then the chances aren't good. My claustrophobia doesn't help matters, either. March of 1991, however, saw the necessity for air travel for yours truly. I was 15, and my mom's hometown friend, Mary (and her husband, Emory) were living in Fresno, California. Mom wanted to visit them. I liked Mary & Emory though, if we're ...

This little blog is ten-years-old today. I wanted to mark the occasion, but wasn't sure how. New posts have been a little sparse of late, as I'm not always sure what to say, or how to say it. There's mental energy involved in writing, and sometimes it just isn't there. Life, and all its idiosyncrasies, can get in the way. There's close to five started posts sitting here, in draft mode, that may or may never see the light of day. So it goes. Regardless of how frequently I write a new post, this blog has already lasted longer than my previous one. That was a very political endeavor -- almost exclusively so. I was a lot more righteous back in the early-to-mid aughts. Life, experiences, a bout with cancer, and simply aging conspired to mellow me somewhat, at least in what I choose to (figuratively) put to pen to paper about. Also, I owe a debt of gratitude to the late, great Roger Ebert.

Recently I watched the movie Driveways , about a woman and her young son who travel to her sister's house in upstate New York. The sister has passed away, and the woman must sort through the belongings in her house and get it ready to go on the market. An old man lives next door, a Korean War vet (Brian Dennehy, in one of his last roles), and he and the boy befriend each other. That is much of the heart of the movie, and it reminded me of me when I was a kid. My knee-jerk recollection of childhood is that it was friendless, though that isn't accurate. There were Derrick, and Kyle (more than one), and a handful of others who I hung out with, rode bikes around town with, played outside with until the streetlights came on, etc. We had our fun. Those relationships weren't constant, however. I'm not sure if childhood friendships ever really are? The long stretches of loneliness in between friends, filled with self-doubt and the uncertainty of whether there would be another c...

Her name was Dorothy Shirley, but to me she will always be Shirley Shirley. It can be argued that she had two first names and, for a kid no older than ten, it's easy to see how one could get confused. I remember my mom exasperatedly trying to explain to me how her name was Dorothy, not "Shirley Shirley," as I was prone to (innocently) calling her. We went round and round about this, like some unintentional Abbott & Costello routine. "Who the hell is named Shirley Shirley?!" mom exclaimed at one point. I still didn't understand, but decided to back down, not wanting the back & forth to continue. Dorothy Shirley lived across the street and slightly to the south from us, at the corner of the street. We knew everyone on our little block of Draper St. when I was growing up, save one. That's just the way it was. Directly across from us were the Tuchels, Bob and Wanda. Bob died in 2019, aged 98. Wanda is still living. Next door, to the north, were th...

W e moved from the house -- mom, dad and I -- in Spring of 1986, so this would have been around Christmas of 1983, 1984, or 1985, no later than that. I was standing on the front porch of our home on Draper St., the first home I'd ever known, with a couple of friends. I think one of them was Lyle? Maybe? I don't know. There were a couple of friends present. They'd come over earlier, and we'd just finished playing for the day. We were on the porch, doing that midwestern small talk before saying goodbye, and somehow, perhaps because it was in the offing, the subject of Christmas came up.

"Hello, how are you? Have you been alright Through all those lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely nights?" - Telephone Line ,  ELO T here was a time when I used to love talking on the phone. This was before the ubiquity of the Internet, before cell phones, texting, video calls, etc. It was also before I had a job, and much of the work I've ended up doing over the years has fallen under the designation of customer service, where I would interact with folks either in-person or over the phone. That can wear down one's capacity for certain types of contact methods during off-hours. This was before all of that. This was when I was a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed young person.

      O ne of the topics at Thanksgiving was the lost art of letter writing. Once a commonplace necessity of communication, it is now wistfully recalled by those old enough to remember when it was abundant. It can certainly be argued that it had its time, and technology has usurped it, opening avenues of imparting dialogue and information to those we care about in ways that surpass the quaint, clunky method of writing something in our own hand on pieces of paper, folding them up, putting them in an envelope, paying for postage and mailing them off, only to take perhaps several days to reach their destination. And yet...