Son of a Curmudgeon

In Praise of Good Food

2012-02-19T13:07:00.005-05:00

The weasely little corn-rowed guy with the mop and the yellow plastic "Wet Floor" sign always seemed to want to swab the deck around my table while I was trying to enjoy my daily late-afternoon Flame-Broiled Double Whopper® with Medium Fries and Large Coke®. I’m all for cleanliness and industrial hygiene, but this did dampen by appreciation of the ambiance just a bit.

Thank God the food was so good. I mean, who cares about a little gastro-esophageal reflux, a little intestinal gas, a little weasely corn-rowed guy with a mop and an attitude, when you can look forward, every day, to a delicious, nutritious, succulent Flame-Broiled Double Whopper® with Medium Fries and Large Coke®? Lord knows, I didn’t always dine so handsomely. I used to eat a lot of junk, I’m sorry to say – oatmeal, bran muffins, leafy green vegetables, fruit, chicken, fish. Garbage like that. Just remembering it makes my stomach queasy. My favorite meal in those days consisted of wood chips, fat-free dried celery and diet water. I kept a framed picture of the Official Food Guide Pyramid® taped to the ceiling over my bed, so I’d be sure to see it last thing before lights-out at night and first thing at reveille in the morning. I just knew that, by sticking faithfully to the Gospel According to Today's Current Food-Crank Fad, I stood a good chance of adding a month or two to the life of my carcass – assuming I didn’t get mixed up in a nuclear war or a collision with an eighteen-wheeler.

I know, I know. I was misguided. I bought into all the stuff the Nutri-Nazis were ramming – literally – down our throats. All that stuff about how a little dab of real mayonnaise would make your coronary arteries clog up like a sink drain full of cat hair. Respectable citizens shunned people who abused their bodies this way, and cast them into outer darkness (with weeping and gnashing of teeth – can you blame them?) for even UTTERING the phrase "red meat." Doctors insisted the words alone were carcinogenic.

Can there BE a Politically Incorrect Joke?

2012-01-24T10:48:00.006-05:00

I had the bad taste and poor judgment recently to forward to members of my writers' group a couple of jokes I received online from some rather outspoken friends. I thought they (the jokes, not necessarily the friends) were pretty funny. They were OBVIOUSLY intended as humor. I thought "writers" (of all people) would appreciate a joke -- the more outrageous and politically incorrect the better. I certainly wasn't endorsing or advocating the content.

Imagine my surprise when a couple of these literary colleagues put on their Holier-than-Thou hats and took me to task. It seems some of these incredibly articulate and smarter-than-everybody-else wordsmiths have pretty thin skins when it comes to people taking playful jabs at their sacred cows.

Well, I'm a writer, too (and therefore, in my own opinion, smarter than everybody else)(what the hell is a "writer", anyway? Can't everybody do it?), and I intend to keep on sharing my own notions of humor, tasteless as some self-righteous people might find it. That's why there's a "delete" button on the desktop, Your Collective Holinesses.

Of course, we can keep up the dialogue, too, as long as we keep personalities out of it.

Yeah, RIGHT...

A Partially Accomplished Mission

2012-01-21T17:53:00.004-05:00

In keeping with my current obsession with submarines, I drove 60 miles from Reading to Philadelphia today, intending to tour the sub USS Becuna (SS-319), parked at Penn's Landing at the foot of Lombard Street. This, as it turned out, was not a very smart idea, because icy conditions had closed the entire seaport complex. So, instead of descending into the cozy, claustrophobic innards of Becuna, I skidded around on the ice and got a sense of how a Russian sailor must feel in Murmansk or Kamchatka in the winter. I can understand why they didn't want civilian tourists cracking their skulls on a January-glazed submarine deck, but still...

...it would have been fun to get aboard. Becuna is a pre-nuclear diesel-electric boat, upgraded after World War II as a GUPPY-class (Greater Underwater Propulsion Power Program) sub. Her WWII operations extended from 23 August 1944 to 27 July 1945. During this period she completed five war patrols in the Western Pacific and is credited with having sunk two Japanese tankers totaling 3,888 tons...

[Thanks, Wikipedia].

Anyway -- slightly crestfallen at not being able to accomplish my mission. I went to Chinatown and satisfied a sudden craving for Kung Pao chicken. This replaced the sting of frustration with the burning sensation of chomping down on whole red chili peppers. I'll get inside that sub some other day, and then I'll REALLY bore you with more than you want to know about submarines.

Here We Go Again

2012-01-03T10:11:00.001-05:00

Happy new year to all who visit here! Stay tuned for more stuff, as the spirit moves.

The Morning After the Night Before...

2011-12-26T10:45:00.002-05:00

'Twas the morning of Christmas, and up at the Mall,

No shoppers were shopping, no shoppers at all.

The mobs strangely vanished, the traffic at rest,

The sun's in the east, soon 'twill set in the west;

Then the world will proceed its quotidian way,

The serenity of Christmas lasts but one day.

MERRY CHRISTMAS, MY FRIENDS! KEEP THE SPIRIT ALIVE!

Merry Christmas! Happy New Year!

2011-12-18T18:19:00.005-05:00

To all our friends out there in the blogosphere, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and ACLU-approved neutral non-sectarian season's greetings! (Of course, if it's so neutral and non-sectarian, one might be excused for wondering why we bother with the season or the greetings.) Anyway, the rough weather and the health challenges seem to have faded into the distance, for now. The only sad thing was the untimely passing-away last week of our friend and talented poet (in both Spanish and English) Awilda Ivette Castro Suarez. She lived in a dark place and hid it so well behind a wide smile and a cheerful persona that it came as a rude shock to learn she would no longer be sharing her gifts with us. We should treasure our loved ones, because we cannot know whether they will be with us tomorrow. None of us is getting out of this alive; we should live, laugh and love whenever we can -- while we can. So, blessings to all of you.

THE AUTUMN FROM HELL

2011-11-20T12:28:00.009-05:00

I'VE BEEN neglecting this blog for several weeks, but it hasn't been for lack of excitement. Quite the contrary, in fact. The week of November 7 - 11 I spent mostly flat on my back in the hospital, having been admitted with dizzy spells and extremely low blood pressure. While I was there, they filled me with such a smorgasbord of chemicals that they grew reluctant to release me -- because now my blood pressure was too HIGH. Go figure. Things seem back in balance now, and I feel fine (he said, vigorously knocking on wood).

A week earlier, we had a freak Halloween snowstorm -- a heavy, wet one. Since most of the leaves were still on the trees, limbs came down by the score all over the area. One clipped my car to the tune of some $4,500 in body damage. Here was the scene the morning after...

Falling limbs took out power lines throughout the region; we were lucky to be in the cold and the dark for only four days. Others had no power for a week or more.

A couple of weeks before that was the pokhyelbka incident which I wrote about in the last posting.

Yes, it's been a rough autumn so far. But next week is Thanksgiving, so we'll count our blessings and be grateful for them. Best wishes for a peaceful holiday to all who visit this site.

And then -- Black Friday and all the attendant horrors of the weeks that follow. May we all keep the year-end holiday season in proper (and sane) perspective.

Pokhyelbka

2011-10-18T15:47:00.003-04:00

A couple of weeks ago, I started to cook a lovely Russian soup called Pokyelbka on our ancient electric stove. My wife warned me not to do it, but I put the ingredients into a ceramic slow-cooker crock, and everything seemed to be going along beautifully until she tried to move the crock. Yes, the crock broke. Yes, the soup poured out. Dammit. The end result was a shorted-out stove, which was due for replacement anyway. But when the new stove arrived, it appeared that the electrical plug had shorted out, too. So...for the last three weeks, we've been subsisting on take-out food, electric wok food, and microwave food. I don't even know if I can cook any more. Or if I should...

End of Summer

2011-09-04T11:36:00.005-04:00

THE EARLIER sunsets are growing more noticeable every day. September is here. Tomorrow is Labor Day. The Autumnal Equinox is a little more than two weeks away. School has started; the Mile-Long School Bus rumbles around the sharp corner in front of our house like clockwork at 7:30 AM every school day, stirring us from sleep with the reminder of another day.

I love this season, when the sweltering blaze of summer becomes more muted and restful, and the crispness of October and the bright lights of the year-end holidays buffer the inevitability of winter. Perhaps I'll even get more writing done. I've just started an ambitious dramatization of a Russian submarine disaster in the Pacific Ocean in 1968. Hallelujah!

The Century Mark

2011-08-04T15:25:00.005-04:00

She made it. Wearing a flowered dress, a silver tiara, and a pleased but ever so slightly bewildered look at the gaggle of offspring, grandchildren, nieces, nephews and assorted in-laws who had gathered to mark the occasion, Janet North Page Fuger passed her 100th birthday with an expression that seemed to say, "I'm just fine, thank you, so glad you asked -- whoever you are." Here are some pictures.

With granddaughter Betsy Paquette. The whole crew (give or take a few).

Happy Birthday, Aunt Janet!!

2011-07-23T13:27:00.008-04:00

NEXT FRIDAY, July 29th, my Aunt Janet Fuger, now of Rochester Hills, Michigan, will turn 100 years old. This is one extraordinary lady, who has outlived her three brothers (including my father), by keeping herself active, interested and physically fit. In the above ancient photo, she's Janet North Page, the happy-looking little dark-haired girl who at the time was probably three or four years old. The young man with her is her older brother Joe. Here are a couple more scenes from the same album... These images were in a beat-up old family album that has spent most of its life stored away in musty attics and damp basements, and I find it amazing that the pictures survived as well as they have. I'm also very pleased that Aunt Janet's centenary celebration prompted me to resurrect these images and scan them for posterity.

Just for fun and comparison, here's how Aunt Janet looked (and behaved) in August 1982, during a family vacation/reunion in Pointe aux Barques, Huron County, Michigan... It's been at least ten years since I last saw my Aunt. I'm grateful to my Michigan cousins, who are hosting an impromptu family reunion, to be capped off with an ice-cream social to be held next Saturday afternoon in Rochester Hills. And here's a toast to all families everywhere, and the bonds, however sporadic and tenuous, that bind them together!

Rust Belt Abstracts

2011-07-17T11:58:00.012-04:00

One sunny afternoon recently, my old wanderlust came over me, and I found myself trespassing on Norfolk Southern railroad property in Reading, PA. This is the site of the old Outer Station of the Reading Railroad, now nothing more than a memory and a property you can acquire while playing Monopoly. The omega-shaped horseshoe (or lyre) expansion loops in a long-dormant overhead steam transmission caught my eye, and I made a few images...

I'm no steam engineer, but my understanding is that these graceful loops are installed at intervals on a steam transmission line, to allow for metal expansion when steam is passing through. They also make an appealing abstract image -- to me, at least.

The folks in charge take a pretty dim view of civilians prowling around this place, because there's still a lot of heavy rolling stock moving around. While I was there, a freight train was being made up, as you see on the left above. The sounds of rail cars being coupled and uncoupled is a pretty impressive staccato drumroll. It's comforting to see that there's still some railroad activity around here. Maybe not what it was in the 1880s, but I'm not either.

Small-Town Still Life

2011-07-08T10:18:00.001-04:00

Here's a little tableau that presented itself to my wandering eyes last weekend in Jim Thorpe, PA. Kind of a Travelocity ad for rednecks, I suppose.

Make New Friends But Keep the Old

2011-07-01T11:09:00.002-04:00

My Faithful Friends, originally uploaded by Clempage.

Here's some of the photo equipment I've used since 1967, when I first started taking pictures with more or less serious intent. Two weeks ago, my lovely daughters dragged me kicking and screaming into the digital era by giving me a Canon EOS Rebel T1i Digital SLR. Having played around with this new toy for a while, I've given the Old Guard a dignified retirement. Like a military reserve unit, however, I'm keeping them in readiness for future operations.

A Day in Manayunk

2011-07-01T08:31:00.007-04:00

A little sliver of the City of Philadelphia extends along the east shore of the Schuylkill. It's the site of the earliest transportation canal started in the United States. The name of the place is "Manayunk," from an American Indian word meaning "place to drink." Nowadays the drinking isn't from the river, but you can get a variety of drinks and interesting food items from the establishments that line Main Street.

On a recent Saturday, we visited the annual Manayunk Arts Festival, which for a weekend crams the community with visitors who, after they miraculously find a place to park, jam the main thoroughfare to see the work of hundreds of artists, artisans, craftspersons and other interesting characters displaying their work.

Among the more unexpected examples of craftsmanship were what some Chabaa Thai Restaurant chefs with surgical skills and time on their hands were doing with some...

... watermelons.

I'm sure Manayunk has reverted to its usual identity as a sleepy little riverside neighborhood, dozing away in the sunshine and the rain, dreaming of its past days as a center of transportation (canal and railroad) and industry. It's easy to miss as you drive along the Schuylkill Expressway just across the river.

Scotland the Brave!

2011-06-19T16:07:00.010-04:00

Over the years, one of our family's favorite outings has been the Colonial Highland Gathering, held every year in mid-May at the Fair Hill Horse Show grounds in Fair Hill, Maryland, just over the Mason-Dixon Line from Oxford, Pennsylvania. My daughter Lindsay was a competing Highland dancer, and I competed occasionally in the amateur solo piping events and participated in the pipe band competitions. If you're ever looking for a colorful and unusual way to spend a lovely outdoor Saturday afternoon in May, I commend this event to you. These folks have been putting on this show for over 50 years, and they have the details worked out to near-perfection.

After Lindsay grew up and moved away, and after I drifted away from the piping scene (more's the pity), I missed the Colonial Gathering for more years than I can remember. So, it was with a poignant sense of nostalgia that Eve and I headed down the road to Fair Hill for this year's Gathering. Of course, there was the spectacle of the massed pipe bands at the formal opening of the Games...

And you could watch the mysterious process of tuning a pipe band for competition: Half an hour's fiddling with reeds and drones and chanters, for maybe seven minutes of time performing under the critical scrutiny of a panel of judges (who would probably write on the score sheets that the tuning should have been better)...

There were many tempting (mostly greasy) Scottish food items for sale...

...but you had to be prepared to wait ... and wait ... and wait... (Don't see too many skinny folks here. Do you?)

And whether all that waiting was worth it is a question on which I take a more jaundiced view nowadays than I did in my earlier years when I was blessed -- or cursed -- with an industrial-strength gastrointestinal system.

As the soon-to-be summer sun began to sink in the perfect sky overhead, we headed for home, burping happily with the taste of Forfar bridies and beer. The Fair Hill Games had been one of our family's favorite gigs back in younger times, but this year I found I had experienced at first hand the truth of Thomas Wolfe's observation that you can't go home again. It was fun, but it didn't have quite the electric thrill it has had for me in the past. Ah, so, sic transit gloria mundi.

And, I hasten to add, if you haven't experienced a Scottish festival like this one -- especially if you have children -- you owe it to yourself to check it out. Who knows? The bug might bite you the way it bit me and my family many years ago. It's a great way to experience something you don't see every day if you're not in Scotland or Canada!

In the final analysis -- even if you can't go home again in the strictest sense -- it's satisfying to revisit places you've been happy in the past.

A Happy Occasion

2011-05-28T09:36:00.005-04:00

It was a couple of lovely May days on the campus of Harvard University, witnessing and participating in Lindsay's doctoral commencement from the Graduate School of Education! Pretty doggone inspirational, it was. Here's what she looked like after the robing ceremony on Wednesday the 25th:

And here's a shot of her with Brad and his family:

The ceremony took place in the Tercentenary Theater in Harvard Yard, between Widener Library and the University chapel:

And here's what all the fuss was about:

It was a wonderful occasion, but it seemed to fly by, and a wistful sense of anticlimax hovered in the background after it was all over. Unlike the typical graduation, however, there was no packing up, loading of the car, tearful farewells and signing of yearbooks. Lindsay will be working at the Center for Education Policy Research in Cambridge, teaching statistics at Harvard, continuing to live on campus as a freshman proctor, and raising daughter Nora. Brad will be pursuing neurology research at Mass General and Harvard. I fear we have a couple of career academics in the family.

Yes, it was with a touch of mellow "the-party's-over" feeling that we boarded the subway for South Station and the Greenbush commuter rail line bound for Cohasset and a visit with our dear friends John and Pokey Kornet. That feeling passed as we spent a delightful evening discussing everything from mosquito netting in Thailand to global financial planning, which reinforced my belief that good friends can converse on just about any subject.

A Week in the Tropics

2011-02-07T09:16:00.008-05:00

EVEN THOUGH my triumphal re-entry into Philadelphia late last Saturday was aboard a wheelchair rather than a quadriga (chariot with four horses to you non-Latinists), Eve and I had a wonderful week in St. Maarten/St. Martin, Dutch/French Antilles. We'd flown out the week before during a temporary lull in the barrage of snowstorms plaguing this area, and spent the next seven days under clear skies reveling in 80-degree temperatures.

Just around the corner from our Dutch-side villa was Cupecoy Beach, one of the island's famous clothing-optional bathing venues. When I noticed that I was the only male on the beach wearing swim trunks, I thought, "What the hell, when in Rome..." and took 'em off. Never thought I'd do that. Such is the magic of SXM. It's interesting how the standard-issue human body, after a certain age, is not really all that erotically stimulating. I was reminded of a herd of elephant seals on a rocky beach in sub-antarctic South Georgia.

The rest of the time, we toured the island over its narrow, traffic-choked roads, enjoyed a couple of truly outstanding meals at Le Bistro Nu in Marigot and the Calmos Cafe in Grand Case, explored the ruins of Fort Louis in Marigot, and lounged around the pool at our Ocean Club villa.

Of course, I was not going to be allowed to get away with so much enjoyment scot-free. On the Friday before we left, all the rich food and drink started to blossom into an excruciating flare-up of gout in my left foot, and by the time our plane landed in Philly, I could hardly walk and every step felt as if it was through broken glass. Hence the wheelchair.

Would I do it again? You betcha! Wheelchair and all.

A Sunset Journey into History

2010-10-24T16:22:00.006-04:00

Eve and I celebrated our seventeenth wedding anniversary on October 9, 2010 with a sundown wine-and-cheese trip aboard the parlor car "Marian" on the Strasburg Rail Road, through some lovely, pastoral Lancaster County, Pennsylvania countryside. Having spent the first years of my boyhood in the age of steam locomotives and elegant passenger trains, this was more of a sentimental journey than I'd expected. I can still remember living close to both the Pennsylvania and Reading railroad lines in the Schuylkill Valley across the river from Conshohocken and falling asleep to the sounds of trains passing in the night -- the chuffing of the engines and the haunting wail of steam whistles. The air horns on today's Diesel locomotives don't even come close to that melancholy quality. The Strasburg Rail Road is a wonderful window into a day we'll never see again in this country, except where historically-minded folks take the time and effort to preserve and re-create these extraordinary pieces of machinery...

The Iron HorseAnd the Sinews of the Iron Horse.

We came to this adventure expecting a good time, and we certainly got what we bargained for. However, we didn't expect to be riding in such distinguished company... Someone told President Roosevelt he had a lot of nerve to be traveling in luxury with a woman not his wife. Ah, well. Luxury it was, and a fitting capstone to seventeen years of wedded bliss -- ours, that is; not necessarily Teddy's...

At the Foot of Broad Street

2010-10-10T12:33:00.009-04:00

IT'S PROBABLY NOT generally known, but at the foot of Broad Street in Philadelphia, at the U.S. Naval Base, is what's left of the Henry C. Mustin Naval Air Facility -- a military airfield now abandoned and slowly being reclaimed by Mother Nature. Grass and even small trees sprout between cracks in the concrete of what once were runways where vintage warplanes took off and landed in the 1930s through the 1940s and perhaps even into the '50s. My little springtime wandering brought me to this place, which I'd last seen in 1976 when I was stationed at the Navy yard as a liaison officer to visiting ships during the Bicentennial celebration. Here's a big hangar which now serves as a commissary for Navy Yard personnel, of whom there are fewer and fewer with every passing year (note the jetliner making its approach to Philadelphia International Airport several miles to the north of Mustin Field)... I wasn't sure whether I was venturing into forbidden territory as I drove north along the Delaware into the semi-wilderness of the old airfield. I didn't see any "Trespassers Will Be Shot" signs, but I remember the Navy Yard being a seriously security-conscious place back in my Cub Scout field-trip days, when they didn't even allow cameras to be brought through the gate.

Adjoining the airfield complex were a goodly number of abandoned row homes, which undoubtedly housed base families back when Mustin Field was a going concern. It was an eerie feeling to be wandering in the midst of a ghost town within the geographic limits of one of the nation's largest cities. It occurred to me that, homelessness being the urban problem it is, these structures might have been fixed up and put to good use in some fashion...

The Naval Base is also the last stop before the razor-blade factory for a number of ships comprising the nation's mothball fleet. Back in the day, the carrier Enterprise and the battleship Iowa were moored there, along with a host of cruisers, destroyers and other ships of the line. On this particular day, however, I saw mostly retired amphibious vessels and minesweepers. Here's an image of a dock landing ship of the type that steamed with our squadron deployed in the Caribbean in 1968 and 1969... And the strange-looking ship you see in this image is a Newport class tank landing ship that wasn't even in commission back when I was an LST engineering officer in '69... Back in MY day, the stars of the LST fleet were the Suffolk County class -- bigger than but essentially no different from the ships that landed tanks and vehicles over the beach at Normandy in 1944... Although I can say with a straight face that I served in the country's naval forces in the Vietnam years, I got real lucky with respect to WHERE I served. If I had extended my service contract for an additional year, I was looking at shore duty with a beachmaster unit in the Mediterranean. But I'll never know what an adventure that might have been because I opted to return to civilian life at the first opportunity.

I guess we can drive ourselves nuts pondering what might have been.

It was a rather melancholy thing to see what's become of Philadelphia's Naval Base, but I was glad to have dropped in for a look-see. The next -- and last -- stop on my sentimental journey was 1714 Sylvan Lane, Gladwyne, PA, where my family lived from 1957 to 1997. There were a number of trees in the front yard which survived the grading and landscaping during construction, and it appeared one of them had finally given up the ghost. The new owners had done something I've never seen before, and I must say it's one of the most creative and imaginative uses of a dead tree I've ever seen... My Dad was a talented whittler. I think he would have approved this piece of work.

And so, surfeited with nostalgia, I charted a course for Reading (which is not an easy place to get to from Philadelphia when the traffic is heavy), and the next day I was back in harness, slogging away through the swampland known as The Practice of Law. If I keep practicing, and if I live long enough, I just may get it right.

Springtime in the City

2010-10-02T14:57:00.009-04:00

One pretty day last April, I got my usual case of springtime wanderlust. Since nothing dramatic was going on at the office, I proudly and unabashedly decided to go off on a little frolic to my old home town, Philadelphia. Since I was in no particular hurry, I drove down Kelly Drive, along the east shore of the Schuylkill. In the East Falls section of the city, I visited Castle Ringstetten, the upriver clubhouse and social quarters of the Undine Barge Club, one of the venerable rowing clubs whose boats are housed along Boathouse Row several miles downriver....

Many years ago, I put in a lot of miles pulling an oar (or, in some cases, a pair of sculls) up and down the Schuylkill, wearing the colors either of the Undine Barge Club or The Haverford School. Won my share of medals and trophies and plaques and other hardware, which still collects dust around the house. Castle Ringstetten was locked up tight that day, but I remember what a wonderful museum of late nineteenth-century Philadelphiana the place contains. Back then (and still today, I'm sure), Undinians gathered there for several dinner meetings every year, each time beginning the meal with the traditional "Handle Oars!" (pick up silverware); "Toss!" (bang silverware on table); "Let Fall!" (drop silverware back on table, with as much noise as possible).

Well, I didn't get inside, but I wandered around back, where it appeared some horticulturally-inclined folks had been at work on an azalea garden... By this time, I was good and hungry, so I wandered down to Fourth and Bainbridge Streets for a visit to the Famous Fourth Street Deli...

The Famous, as it's known among those who love it, was a favorite haunt during my Naval Reserve days at the Philadelphia Navy Yard in the '70s and the '80s. The fella who ran the place in those days -- David something-or-other -- would spot a bunch of us in uniform coming through the door and holler to the waitress who usually served us, "Stand by, Maggie! The fleet's in!"

My salivary glands still experience a Pavlovian torrent at the memory of huge piles of warm beef brisket on an onion roll, with cole slaw and Russian dressing, and a great big Kosher dill pickle. So, I guess you know what I had for lunch that day. It took some determination to finish the thing, it was so big, but I certainly wasn't going to allow any of that to escape.

Burping happily, I toddled off to my next destination, which I'll tell you about next time.

Something new? What?

2010-09-26T12:11:00.003-04:00

All righty, then. Summer 2010 vanished in the space of a few rather silly blog entries about vacation trips.

"Get some new material, man!" I hear a still, small voice urging somewhere in the distance.

"What new material?" says I. "There's nothing new under the sun. It's just the same old merry-go-round, day after day."

"Ah. You're not paying attention, then," replies the SSV.

So, your humble correspondent will now try to get back into the habit of taking more notice of what's going on around him.

Count on it. But don't bet the ranch -- yet.

End-of-Summer Wrap-Up, 2010

2010-09-12T13:09:00.008-04:00

Anyone glancing from time to time at this electronic feuilleton could be forgiven for thinking I lead a hopelessly humdrum life, having reported on nothing in the entire summer of 2010 other than a three-day trip to various points north of here. Lazy? Maybe. Humdrum? No! For example, one stifling night in July we heard a loud snap and a crash in our front yard. The harsh light of day revealed this...

It may not look like much in the picture, but it was a HUGE limb from the aging sweet-gum tree in our front yard, and it missed my car by a couple of feet. It served as a neighborhood conversation piece for several days, before a tree specialist removed it.

Then, at the end of August, there was the Family Vacation From...uh...I mean, the Family Vacation to the Nether Regions -- namely Virginia. This epic adventure was the brainchild of my wife Eve and her daughter Taryn; I was informed in no uncertain terms that this trip was to orbit exclusively around Taryn's daughter Kyla, age 7, and I had no authority or responsibility whatsoever, but only the privilege of paying for gas and meals. I had certain reservations about this, but I was smart enough to keep my mouth shut and bring a good book to read.

First on the agenda was Virginia Beach. I have fond memories of Virginia Beach, having lived there in the winter of 1969, when it looked like this one cold night...

In late August 2010, it bore a much closer resemblance to a popular Atlantic beach resort town...

We shoe-horned five persons and all their gear into an average-sized motel room in one of the beach-front high-rise hotels. The grandparents spent three luxurious nights slumbering fitfully on a fold-out sofa-bed while the huge-screen TV flickered violently and soundlessly because one of our number (who shall remain nameless here) proved nocturnal, insomniac, and utterly oblivious to more traditional notions of allowing others a decent night's sleep.

On Friday of that weekend, after a frantic and fruitless search for my GPS device which had gone missing in the chaos of our living quarters, we set out in caravan, to proceed up the James River peninsula. Colonial Williamsburg was our focal point; but, lurking in the background like a black widow spider in a bad mood, was (ominous music) BUSCH GARDENS!! I would rather crawl on my belly through broken glass and plunge into a pool of isopropyl alcohol than go to Busch Gardens in the middle of summer with a seven-year-old child. Call me an old grouch if you want; I come by it honestly and I named this blog accordingly.

I remember Williamsburg from November 1960, when my parents and two brothers and I spent the Thanksgiving holiday there in one of the historic inns on Duke of Gloucester Street. It was good to get back and wander around for a couple of days. Here are a couple of images of the Governor's Palace...

I have great respect for the folks who put so much effort into maintaining Williamsburg as a faithful representation of the way things looked in that part of Virginia when it was still a British colony. I also have great respect for my son-in-law's father, who arranged for us to stay in one of the apartments at the Historic Powhatan Village, part of an international time-share resort empire whose name I've forgotten. Where the quarters in Virginia Beach were a bit too cozy for comfort, this place was a sheer delight.

It broke my heart when Eve told me we would not be able to join the kids at Busch Gardens on Sunday, because we had to drive home and be ready to rejoin the ratrace the following day. When I learned of this change of plans, I felt as if the governor had issued a pardon moments before the death-row warden could throw the switch.

And so, we hit the open road and made our leisurely way north, past Richmond, Washington, Baltimore, York and Lancaster, back to our home and our sweet-gum tree which mercifully had not dropped any more limbs. With only a modicum of shrill back-seat driving from somewhere on my right flank, I brought Eve's beloved PT Cruiser back to port unscathed. And then...

...peace reigned over the realm. And I found my GPS unit in my suicase, right where I'd left it several days before.

The Road Trip: Finale

2010-08-07T13:35:00.009-04:00

I simply MUST complete the June 2010 road-trip saga before the summer ends.

So, without further ado:

I arrived at Harvard Yard around 4:30 Friday afternoon, after an uneventful straight shot across the Mass Pike from the Berkshires. As it turned out, I was just in time to walk with Lindsay from Grays Middle to Nora's day-care center down on the Cambridge bank of the Charles River. I'd hoped to have a current picture of Nora for you, but I've already mentioned the camera casualty that rendered that impossible. Here's one from a year earlier... The face and hair are more filled-out, but the personality is just the same -- albeit quite a bit more verbal. That evening, Brad and Lindsay (and Nora) treated me to a birthday dinner at John Harvard's Brew House, a popular Cambridge watering hole with a pleasant rathskeller ambiance and a menu of some old favorites as well as some unusual items, such as pulled-pork sliders and pizzas built on crusts baked from dough incorporating spent grain from the brewing process. It was good to see the kids -- all three of them -- and settle the dust from the road with a bite of food and a glass or two of the local ale.

Back at the apartment, Lindsay whipped an ice-cream cake out of the freezer and we polished off a decent chunk of it at a table in the Yard as evening descended and the campus began showing early signs of the impending rush of summer students expected the next day.

One of the objectives of this trip was a visit to my Dartmouth classmate and best man John Kornet and his wife Diana (best known as Pokey). Brad and Lindsay had a function to attend on Saturday afternoon, so I headed down the South Shore to Cohasset, where the Kornets live in waterfront splendor. After almost being completely stymied by weekend traffic bound for Cape Cod (which makes Philadelphia-to-South-Jersey weekend traffic look like a walk in the park by comparison), I arrived to find the annual Arts Festival in full swing on the grounds of the First Parish Church... This was a gala function indeed. John was manning a display featuring a group (whose name I have sadly forgotten) whose function is to produce and distribute complete portable disaster relief shelter and equipment packages for rapid deployment to worldwide disaster sites such as post-earthquake Haiti. It was fascinating to see how much equipment, including cooking equipment, utensils and a tent to shelter up to ten people, could be packed into a rectangular box not much larger than a full-size household refrigerator-freezer. Here's a shot of John and Pokey...

As always seems to happen when I get together with these folks (altogether too seldom), the years fell away and we were reminiscing (and swapping lies) about the good old days and wondering where the time had gone. It was a great visit. Too short, but a great visit. I drove back to Boston in a thoroughly mellow mood, enjoyed a home cooked dinner with the kids -- all three of them -- and watched a movie (whose title I have conveniently forgotten) about the mistreatment of women in certain Muslim societies which, although nauseating, couldn't dampen my good spirits.

Next morning, it was time to bring my Road Trip to a merciful end and head for the barn. I took my leave after breakfast (that Lindsay knows how to make pancakes) and was home well before sundown.

I don't know what all this proves -- if anything -- other than the realization (which I've hinted at before) that we can revisit old haunts and old friends and cherished relatives, but we cannot turn back the clock or the calendar. That isn't news, I know: perhaps Rabbie Burns said it best in the ballad of Tam O' Shanter:

"Nae mon can tether time nor tide..." v>

The Road Trip - Chapter II: On to the Berkshires

2010-07-24T08:38:00.009-04:00

It was good to shake the dust of Poughkeepsie from my feet. The place baked in the relentless sunlight and just looked tired, dusty, and best seen in the rear-view mirror. The road (U.S. Route 44) then took me north and east, through Millbrook and Amenia in Dutchess County and across the line into Connecticut. In Canaan, U.S. 7 meets Route 44 and heads north into Massachusetts. I had programmed my GPS device to take me to Southfield, Mass., the home town of my dear departed law school friend and classmate Jim Stevens, seen here in June 1978 with my daughter Lindsay, then just a year and a half old, at the top of the World Trade Center (remember?) in New York City... And with your humble correspondent at the Scottish games in Round Hill, Connecticut, in July 1991... A tiny village in the southern Berkshire Hills, Southfield has come a long way since I visited Jim there first in late 1974. We were both first-year law students then and had bonded in our mutual bewilderment at the utterly baffling stuff we had been studying for the past several months. Jim was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and his academic abilities sustained me through many a bout of despair over the mysteries of Marbury v. Madison and other landmark Supreme Court decisions he'd already studied in his undergraduate history courses. In those days, Jim worked holidays at the Southfield village store, which then did double duty as a general store and the municipal post office. Today, new owners have turned it into a Yuppie-chic gourmet cafe and restaurant catering to the burgeoning throngs of urbanites who have established vacation homes in the area... Ultimately, Jim Stevens's story is a tragic one (in keeping with the tone of my road trip? I hoped not). After a long and hard-fought battle with a recurring brain tumor, he died just about 13 years ago to the day, the father of a wonderful son, veteran of many years of criminal prosecution work in the Manhattan District Attorney's office and then a well-respected country practitioner in Great Barrington. It was fond memories of that friendship, so many of them centered on Jim's beloved Southfield, which had brought me there on my 65th birthday, to lay a wreath (figuratively) at his resting place in this idyllic little town seemingly in the middle of nowhere...

My daughters called him "Uncle Jimmy." He was godfather to Lindsay, and honorary godfather to Janet. I was godfather to his son, Armen. While were were at Villanova, he was an almost regular weekend guest in our home, where we tried to feed him up a bit from the diet of cold cereal and freeze-dried mashed potatoes which sustained him during the week in the rooming-house where he lived. His boyhood hero was John Wayne; I remember giving him for his birthday in 1975 a big book of photo stills from movies in which the Duke had starred -- and snippets of whose dialogue Jim could rattle off by heart.

This was another rather melancholy stop on my sentimental journey into New England, but in the end an uplifting one, so I thought. Sometimes it's good to remember places and people who have held vast tracts of one's interior landscape.

Now, it was time to drive up through Stockbridge, Lenox and Lee, get on the Mass Pike, aim the car east, and make a beeline the 112 miles to Boston, then Cambridge, then Harvard Yard, and to turn away from the land of the melancholy to a place of joy, youth, energy -- and Nora Jeanne Molyneaux and her parents!

The Road Trip - Chapter I: Darkness at Midday

2010-07-17T17:51:00.031-04:00

All right. It's time to stop crying over unexposed film and get on with the story.

The first destination on my road trip was 139 Academy Street, Poughkeepsie, New York, an historic Hudson Valley farmhouse listed on the National Register of Historic Places. This was the home where my first wife was raised with her four siblings in such a Bedlam of chaos and dysfunctional relationships that sanity was in critically short supply (if the family folklore is to be believed). Of course, many things become clear only in hindsight. Things seemed normal enough in the Poughkeepsie homestead during most of the two decades of that marriage (1970-1990) -- if one disregarded my ex-mother-in-law's penchant for collecting strange derelict characters and lodging them on the third floor, a kitchen which might have been condemned by the public health authorities (the refrigerator especially), and enough misery and weirdness to have filled a fat novel by Edgar Allan Poe.

So what drew me back to the place? Curiosity, plain and simple. Morbid curiosity? Perhaps. The house has been out of my late ex-wife's family for a good many years now. From outward appearances, it's in the process of falling down, like the House of Usher. It's hard to tell if the place is even inhabited (by living human beings, I mean); certainly no one challenged my walking onto the property to take pictures. It exhaled darkness and decay, even in the middle of a bright day in June 2010.

On this side porch, guests gathered to go through the receiving line after our wedding in August 1970. After looking at the pictures, you may decide for yourself whether or not you'd be willing to set foot on that porch for any purpose. The front of the house, facing Academy Street, was once an imposing specimen of Hudson Valley Victorian architecture; now it's just a specimen of faded glory.

Sic transit gloria mundi, I suppose. So far, my epic sentimental journey was looking a bit shabby and melancholy around the edges. You can't go home again, wrote Thomas Wolfe. It has something to do with time and the river.

DAMMIT!!

2010-06-30T11:48:00.005-04:00

One of my worst fears spread its big black bat wings, flew out of its cave and hovered over my head, blotting out the sunshine and plunging me into the midnight of despair. When I returned from the Road Trip (see previous), the roll of color film I had been shooting during said Road Trip was still in the camera. Subsequent events revealed that the film roll had not seated itself properly on the take-up sprocket; or, to put it plainly, I had been shooting pictures of NOTHING. But I'm a seasoned enough photographer to have been carrying a back-up camera loaded with black-and-white film. So, unless I screw up the processing of that film, I should have something to show you in a few days. In the meantime, my shimmering prose will have to suffice....

The Road Trip -- Prologue

2010-06-27T12:14:00.016-04:00

LIKE ALL complex logistic operations, my Official 2010 First-Days-of-the-Rest-of-My-Life-65th-Birthday-Father's-Day-Summer-Solstice Road Trip had its genesis in meticulous planning. I spent at least fifteen minutes squinting at maps and trying to remember why certain places shown on those maps had some nostalgic or sentimental significance that would justify the time, expense and wear and tear of a solo pilgrimage in my long-in-the-tooth (123,000 miles) 2003 Dodge Neon. I didn't have the time or (so I thought, anyway) the stamina to visit every place in New England that had been formative in my life over the last almost fifty years.

So, we may write of other road trips. For now, we'll concentrate on this one.

Since I was traveling solo, I had the luxury of selecting the musical theme for the voyage. Don't ask me why, but I chose Gustav Mahler's Eighth Symphony -- the "Symphony of a Thousand" -- as suitably majestic and lengthy (not to say tedious) enough to gobble up road miles by the dozen. I listened to it three times on the outward journey and three times on the trip home, in each case with multiple re-plays of the portions which REALLY gave me goosebumps.

The camera gear was important, too. I loaded both Pentaxes, made sure my gadget bag was full of spare ammunition and lenses, flash, tripod, etc. This was going to be a PICTORIAL pilgimage, worthy of such stalwarts as The National Geographic, even if I wasn't packing a nuclear-powered, turbocharged Model K9-P Nikoltacanonflex Digital Demon DSLR Deluxe with hazelnut flavoring and cinnamon sprinkles. Nope, I was going to use film, you see -- with tragic results as you may read presently.

***

AND NOW THE DAY OF DEPARTURE HAD DAWNED!! With a full tank of gas, a big cup of coffee and a couple of contraband doughnuts (another positive aspect of traveling solo), and with Veni, veni, Creator Spiritus ringing forth in full choral splendor from the rear speakers (yet another good thing about flying solo: I get to set the volume where I want), I set out heading east and north, bound for the Hudson River Valley, Dutchess County, and the Town of Poughkeepsie. This was the situs of my first marriage, if you please, and an oft-visited place during the two decades of that (ill-fated in some ways but not others) liaison.

But now, dear readers, I shall leave you while I spend a few days trying to dream up the next episode in this ridiculous saga....

The First Days of the Rest of My Life: My 65th Birthday, Father's Day, Summer Solstice Road Trip

2010-06-18T06:35:00.003-04:00

Watch this blog for stories and pictures from my epic (?) First Days of the Rest of My Life Sixty-Fifth Birthday Summer Solstice A. D. 2010 Road Trip. It covered about 800 miles and 40 years, with stops in Poughkeepsie, New York; Southfield, Massachusetts; Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Cohasset, Massachusetts. The characters ranged in age from two and a half years to ... well ... deceased. Stay tuned!

OBX? OK! SIC? OK! ROG? WTF???

2010-06-06T09:10:00.008-04:00

IF YOU drive a car in traffic, you've seen these little emblems people put on their cars, to say something about themselves. Most often, these are the initials of places the car owner has visited, and found recreationally meaningful or significant, or initials of a college attended or some other talisman. This is one of those little find-the-image-that-doesn't-make-a-bloody-bit-of-sense tests. Please look over the following (this is dead easy, trust me) images, and find the one that doesn't make a bloody bit of sense. Have fun!

Now, we all know this is the ubiquitous "Outer Banx" (huh?) status symbol. This means the driver of the car in question and his/her family (if any) has/have spent time in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and that he/she/it/they can't spell. This one tells us the driver's status involves time spent at a lovely community on the South Jersey seashore. At least this driver knows how to spell the name of his/her/its/their particular vacation Shangri-La.

NOW, for the one that doesn't make a bloody bit of sense...

WHAT??? This is one crazy-ass message. What is/are this person(s) saying?? I spend my vacation at the ORTHODONTIST?? I spend so much money on my orthodontist I can't afford a vacation at OBX or SIC? I have a whole lot of status and you should kiss my ass because I spend money at the orthodontist? I'm providing free advertising for my orthodontist because he/she's charging me out the ying-yang for teeth-straightening?

I'd be most obliged if some reader could explain this puzzle to me....

Up in the San Juans, 1966

2010-05-29T15:49:00.011-04:00

Having just turned 21, I spent the summer of 1966 with my aunt, uncle and cousins in Bellevue, Washington, just across Lake Washington from Seattle. Over the Independence Day weekend, we took the family's cabin cruiser, Molly Brown, on a voyage in the San Juan Islands just below the Canadian border in Puget Sound. Since it was the Pacific Northwest, it rained just about all the time, and memory tells me we didn't see blue sky or sun the entire four-day weekend. But, so what? Once you're wet, you can't get any wetter, right? One of our ports of call was a place called Boat Harbor, a place I haven't been able to locate anywhere in cyberspace today -- so maybe, like Brigadoon, it only appears once every so many years. As I recall, Boat Harbor was pretty much the exclusive domain of the Kendall family in those days, and the Kendalls, like Boat Harbor, seemed pretty elusive and ... well, ominous in absentia. The Kendalls did, however, make their attitude toward visitors pretty plain... In case there's any doubt in your mind about what a "haywire private dock" looks like, this image should give you an idea... Across the harbor, seemingly careened on the beach for caulking, but on closer examination permanently affixed to the real estate, was a vessel which may or may not ever have gone to sea, but which now apparently swashbuckled from a fixed position... All of this happened so long ago, I wouldn't even try to chronicle it were it not for the photographic evidence. Even though I fell in love with the Pacific Northwest that summer, I've only been back once -- for a short visit in May 2008 with my cousin and his wife in Gig Harbor, near Tacoma. There's still nothing that stirs my love for the sea quite as much as the clear, cold, wildly tidal waters of the North (anywhere in the world, but particularly here), teeming with creatures and peopled by quirky characters like the Kendalls (if they ever existed).

A Visit to the Graveyard of the Atlantic II -- An Ocracoke Interlude

2010-05-06T19:04:00.011-04:00

One of the great free rides in this country is the ferry that plies the waters of Hatteras Inlet between Hatteras Island and Ocracoke Island, North Carolina. From May 12 to September 28 every year, they run every half hour from 6:00 A.M. to midnight. The ride takes about 40 minutes, which gives you just enough time to get out of your car, wander around the decks and – on the way over – prepare yourself for a visit to a wild and wonderful seashore, jealously preserved and defended against the kind of gaudy, cheesy high-rise junk that’s ruined so much of our nation’s seacoast. Gordie and I boarded the ferry at about mid-afternoon on the Saturday of our high-adventure camping weekend (see previous post); by the time we debarked on Ocracoke, the sun was shining. Things were looking up. So we thought. We drove down Highway 12 to the National Park Service campground, about three miles north of Ocracoke Village, and booked a site to pitch our still-soggy Navy-issue tent. The park guard told us they were expecting a tropical storm to blow through during the next 24 hours. We said thank you and proceeded to set up the tent and hang some of our wet stuff out to dry.... Then we drove down to Ocracoke Village, a seriously tiny little town that looked like little more than a collection of fishing shacks. As I recall, there was one restaurant, whose name has long since faded from my memory. We stopped there to eat, and came face-to-face with the 1975 Ocracoke version of clam chowder – a thin brownish soup containing some clams (since, by Federal regulation, a restaurateur is prohibited from calling anything “clam chowder” that doesn’t have clams in it) and a large quantity of sand. A forerunner of the high-fiber diet craze, I suppose. At supper, we overheard some more chatter about “Tropical Storm Amy,” which was said to be brewing out there someplace we couldn’t see it. From the Cedar Island Ferry landing in Ocracoke Village, we viewed a sunset much too romantic for two Navy guys away from their significant others, and drowned our sorrows in some of our onboard liquor supplies. After dark had fallen, we returned to our campsite and made preparations to bunk down for the night. Just before lights-out, a park ranger came around in his Jeep and told us the ferry service was being suspended after 9:00 P.M. because of storm warnings. If we weren’t aboard that ferry, we wouldn’t be getting off the island until service resumed sometime the next day. In other words, we had about 20 minutes to catch the last ferry, or else... We did notice that the wind was picking up. After a brief, half-sober council of war, we decided that no little tropical storm could keep us from our adventure, and turned in. After a short while, we noticed the wind was picking up a bit more, and it seemed to have started raining again. And so to sleep, lulled by the whisper of the wind and the gentle drumming of the rain on our not-so-waterproof tent.... It was about 3:00 A.M. when we awoke in at least six inches of water, with our tent collapsed all around us. The wind howled and the rain drove down in torrents. For mid-July, it was cold. We got the tent standing again, after a fashion, and bailed out as much standing water as we could. Then, with what was starting to feel like grim determination, we curled up in soaking misery and occupied our individual versions of hell until morning. Which looked something like this.... I don’t know exactly why it is, not being much of a meteorologist, but once a big storm blows through, the weather usually turns beautiful. The sun was shining again; the wind had dropped to a dead calm. We took bleary-eyed stock of our situation, set up drying clotheslines, splashed some water on our faces (as if that would help anything), had another beer and went back to the Village for breakfast. We noticed that portions of Highway 12 were flooded to a depth that made Gordie quite cautious about navigating. Spirits restored by a day in the sunshine, we boarded the Cedar Island ferry for the two-hour trip back to the mainland, from which we returned to Norfolk by way of Morehead City, with only one automotive breakdown when something hiccupped in the Mazda's Wankel engine (which we all know run by magic and at the time were not too well understood by auto mechanics in rural North Carolina gas stations). After some duct-tape and baling-wire repairs, we got the old Mazda running well enough to get us home not too ridiculously late, ready for another week of Anti-Submarine Warfare School, which should probably have been called "Anti-Climactic Submarine Warfare School That's how I remember it, anyway -- with the help of some old photos I found in the back of a closet. See the following link to a wonderful Ocracoke blog: http://villagecraftsmen.blogspot.com/2010/05/reentry-stickers.html

A Visit to the Graveyard of the Atlantic, Chapter 1

2010-04-28T13:47:00.011-04:00

It was July 1975. My friend Gordie Keen and I had been sent to the Anti-Submarine Warfare School at the Destroyer-Submarine Base in Norfolk, Virginia, for a two week tour of Naval Reserve duty. On the intervening weekend, we decided it would be fun to take a camping trip down the Outer Banks of North Carolina. So, we checked out a tent and other camping supplies from Navy Special Services and set out Friday evening in Gordie's Mazda sedan. By the time we reached Hatteras Island, it was raining pretty heavily, and we discovered our Navy-issue tent wasn't exactly waterproof. We had one or two bottles of Seagram's 7 and a cooler full of beer (Schmidt's of Philadelphia! Remember?), so we had no trouble getting to sleep, rain notwithstanding. We arose Saturday morning with clothing dampened but spirits undaunted and proceeded to the Cape Hatteras National Seashore Park, where we climbed the 268 steps to the light platform of the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, a/k/a "The Big Barber Pole"... There, 208 feet above sea level, the wind was a mighty elemental force, as you can see...

The visibility was so poor you couldn't see much on the seaward side; but, looking straight down, you could see an amusing bit of seaweed graffiti on the beach... I don't know exactly what the viewer was being exhorted to do (jump off, perhaps?), but what we did was the only sensible thing to do on a day like that: Drive to Hatteras Village and eat breakfast.

Next we checked out the Chicamacomico Lifesaving Station in Rodanthe. Fascinating place, those Outer Banks. Many ships came to grief on the treacherous Diamond Shoals off Hatteras and elsewhere along the Outer Banks, nicknamed "The Graveyard of the Atlantic." You can still see the skeletons of wooden and iron ships along the beaches -- which, by the way, in good weather are some of the loveliest beaches in the world.

As the day wore on, we took the ferry from Hatteras Island to Ocracoke, but I'll tell you about that next time.

A DASHING YOUNG CAVALRYMAN

2010-04-03T08:47:00.010-04:00

Here's my paternal grandfather, Joseph French Page, in the dress uniform of the First Troop, Philadelphia City Cavalry. The photo was taken about 1910, but the uniform is of mid-nineteenth-century style. The Philadelphia Light Horse are considered the oldest military unit in continuous existence in the United States (and the British colonies before that). Organized in 1774, the Troop saw service with Washington's army in battles at Trenton (1776), Princeton (1777), the Brandywine, and Germantown and with the Continental Army encamped at Valley Forge (1777). A unit of the Pennsylvania National Guard, the Troop served under General Black Jack Pershing in the Mexican Punitive Expedition in 1916 and were featured in an entertaining novel by Glendon Swarthout titled The Tin Lizzie Troop. During World War I, they formed part of the 28th "Keystone" Division of the American Expeditionary Force in France. A visit today to the Troop's armory at 23rd and Ranstead Streets in Philadelphia wouldn't yield much evidence of mounted cavalry, but the place bristles with tanks, humvees, armored personnel carriers and mobile artillery. The horses come out only for parades and other ceremonial functions. Like all such military units, the officers' mess is a veritable museum of artifacts, insignia and battle honors. Good old Grandpappy Page -- cuts a dashing figure, doesn't he?

A Spring Frolic

2010-03-20T08:07:00.010-04:00

It was a lovely day in late March; the sun shone and the crocuses bloomed. A young nanny goat frolicked in the sunshine. The scene charmed me so, I didn't notice at first that the little goat was missing a hind leg. The occasion was a visit to a veterinary clinic near where I live. The vet tech supervising the goat told me her name is Peggy. She lost her left rear leg because of severe infection from a dog bite Peggy's former owners had left untreated for too long. I knelt down and Peggy danced right up to me, pooped on my shoe and butted my chin gently. Those little nanny goat horns gave a certain amount of emphatic authority to that butt, however gentle. Goat poop isn't a serious problem. "Broom and dustpan is all you need," the tech told me. Lost leg notwithstanding, Peggy pranced about as happily as any four-legged goat on that smiling spring morning. So, whatever YOUR troubles may be (and may they be from few to none), happy first day of spring!

Camouflage

2010-03-18T09:46:00.001-04:00

Camouflage, originally uploaded by Clempage.

About two minutes after I shot this image, the vase and the flowers were on the floor.

Landmarks Across the Years

2010-03-05T14:53:00.007-05:00

Last Thursday would have been my brother Phil's 61st birthday, had he survived. On Saint Patrick's Day 1996, he took his family's golden retriever out for a walk near some ponds behind his house in Marblehead, Mass. He never came home, and the following day his body was recovered from one of those ponds. Shakespeare might have called him "a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy," if he hadn't given Hamlet the phrase to use on the skull of poor Yorick. Yes, Phil was a fine, funny, hard-working, dearly beloved son, brother, husband, father and uncle.

Six years ago today, I died for about four minutes when my heart went into fibrillation at a meeting with a client in Oxford, PA, about 40 miles from home. (No, it wasn't the client's doing). By luck, an emergency rescue team from the nearby firehouse arrived with jump-starting gear in time to get me going again, and here I am, with an implanted electronic pacemaker-defibrillator to guard against recurrences. Today, at just about the six-year anniversary of the date on which I received my first implanted device, I received a replacement.

With luck, I should be in good shape for the next six to eight years. Life is good.

The Assassin's Wages

2010-02-27T09:35:00.004-05:00

The cat, a sleek calico with bold, drop-dead whiskers, purred and rubbed her head and body against the man’s legs as he sat at the kitchen table. Birdsong outside the window told her darkness would soon yield to daylight, but the man wasn’t very responsive; he groaned quietly, drank ice water and popped little round white things into his mouth. The cat sympathized up to a point, but she was hungry and that problem loomed much larger in her consciousness than whatever was troubling the man. Why, she wondered, couldn’t these human creatures -- preoccupied as they were with putting things in their own mouths all the time -- understand that cats like their meals on time, too? They’re too slow, too reluctant, or just plain too stupid, she concluded. She rubbed against his legs again, then stood to one side, stared at him and meowed a crescendoing meow that warned of diminishing patience. The man stood up heavily. The cat galloped toward the cellar stairs. Her food and water bowls were at the foot of the steps, but she paused at the top landing, to make sure her lord and master had gotten and retained the message she had been at such pains to convey. No such luck. With disgust she watched the man lurch out of the kitchen; she heard springs creak as he collapsed onto the living room sofa with a sigh and noisily broke wind. If only I could talk to this lout, she thought as she trotted into the living room. She thumped the floor with her paws and trod as heavily as she could; the technique for stalking a human being and getting him to feed you was entirely different from the technique for stalking a bird or a mouse for the same purpose. “Damn cat, I know you’re there,” the man mumbled. “Shut up and I’ll feed you in a minute.” She meowed and catapulted herself onto the man’s stomach. He grunted, belched and scratched a bit behind her ears; she purred until she vibrated. She walked over his chest and butted his chin twice with her forehead, then settled back on his chest and began kneading him with her front claws. She tugged and pulled at the fabric of his filthy sweatshirt, now and then digging into his flesh, which made him wince and pull her paws away. He’s got it bad this morning, she thought. It must have something to do with all that shouting and shoving he and the other human being were doing late into the night. The other human being -- the smaller one who yelled and shot at her with that damned water pistol whenever she clawed the furniture or climbed on the kitchen counter -- was still upstairs. Not yelling at the moment, though. But, hey, man, she meowed. Enough about you and your mate. What about me? You’re my meal ticket. Let’s get with the program. You think you feel lousy? How do you think I feel? I’m starving. “Okay, kitty,” the man said, hoisting himself from the couch. “Okay. Let’s get you your crunchies.” She bounded for the stairs and waited again at the top, watching as the man trundled across the shiny kitchen floor, turned on the basement light and started down the steps. This is it, she chirruped. Hallelujah. She dodged between the man’s legs, wanting nothing more than to keep him moving in the right direction. Without warning, she felt the impact of the man’s left foot against her left side, partially knocking the wind out of her. As she screeched, hissed and bristled with pain and indignation, the man cried out and pitched headlong down the steep, narrow staircase, thumped to the bottom and landed on his back, spread-eagled on the concrete basement floor. His eyes were open but he didn’t move. His head lay practically in her water bowl. She meowed a few times to remind the man of his mission, but he didn’t respond; he lay still. She marveled at the laziness of human beings -- resting, always resting. After all that commotion, too, she thought; first he kicks me, then he somersaults down the stairs, and now he decides to take another nap. All right, Mac. My patience with you is just about used up. Let’s make with the feeding, already. She meowed again, deep in her throat, long, loud and funereal, for emphasis. He didn’t move. She saw something coming out his ears and spreading in a pool on the floor. It was warm and tasted salty. She meowed and avoided it, rubbing insistently against his legs. “Now what the hell is your problem?” The cat heard a raspy, high-pitched angry human voice and footsteps. Someone was coming. Poised to leap to her vantage point in the overhead ventilation duct-work if necessary, she looked up the stairs. It was the other human being, the smaller one the man had been fighting with last night -- the one with the sharp tongue and the water pistol. The smaller human descended the cellar steps and looked down at the man. She prodded him with her toe, then reached down and touched his neck for a moment. “The stupid bastard’s dead,” the other human being said. She laughed. “Dead! God does answer prayers! “Good kitty. Good, good kitty. Oh, look. Your bowl’s empty. Let’s get you fed. Then we’ll call someone to come haul this sorry sack of shit out of here forever. Good kitty.” She stroked the cat’s forehead. She poured the dry cat food into the bowl, and the cat rubbed against her legs and purred.

The Camera as Time Machine

2010-02-19T09:30:00.005-05:00

It was spring of 1969 -- April, if memory serves. I was serving as a junior officer aboard USS Suffolk County (LST-1173), a unit of Atlantic Fleet Amphibious Squadron Twelve, deployed in the Caribbean. Not a bad place to be serving in those days of raging hostilities in Southeast Asia. Above is a shot of our ship making a practice landing on Red Beach on the island of Vieques, just east of the main island of Puerto Rico. The picture appears tranquil enough, but the chaos that preceded it was the stuff of which Keystone Kops movies are made. Bringing a Suffolk County class tank landing ship inshore, rigging floating causeways, and connecting the whole works to the beach so vehicles can be offloaded is a task which requires the most exacting seamanship. Suffice it to say that our skipper was still learning the ropes in that department. But, we made it, as you see below. One way you can tell this was just a practice landing is by noticing all the people standing around as if they're waiting to buy hot dogs from a pushcart vendor in the park. If there'd been shooting going on, those guys would not be so exposed. As a caption for this picture, how about: "How many Marines does it take to land a tank on a beach?"

These photos are one reason I'm skeptical about digital photography. They were made with a film camera and reposed as negatives in a carton in my closet for over 40 years before I made them into prints. I doubt digital images would have lasted that long in such good condition before being brought to light.

A MOMENT IN THE SPACE-TIME CONTINUUM

2010-02-16T08:27:00.004-05:00

IT'S INTERESTING what one can find while rummaging through boxes of old photos. Interesting and nostalgic beyond belief. So now, travel with me back to June 1964, to the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia, where some unbelievably lucky (although they probably didn't appreciate it at the time) young people were taking part in the upper-crust social life of the day. This was about two years before the youth revolution of the mid-'60s, and the debutante season was still a very big deal in some circles. It was a carefree time, in which we danced the night away and thought not a bit about what might be waiting for us around the corner.

Even though it seems a million years ago in another country -- and maybe a different dimension or a different planet -- I'm grateful to have been a part of it.

And, I wonder where those lovely lassies are now....

The Wonders of Digital Photography

2010-02-09T15:53:00.002-05:00

A comment on digital photography, from a die-hard film photographer: “...it sucks, it's lame, it's stale, it's cheesy, it's evil, it's crap, it's like socialism, I couldn't be bothered anymore (shot digital for two years), it's boring, boring, boring, it's a farce, it killed the photography industry, it's NOT cheaper but looks so bloody cheap, it's generic, it's buying into some stupid upgrade cycle with you losing out in the end. Should I go on?”

When I was starting to take pictures as a more-or-less serious avocation many years ago, one of the most obnoxious types of people I encountered were the ones who spent more time talking about how much their equipment cost than they did making photographs. People with Hasselblads and Leicas and Nikons, etc. spent more time looking at their cameras than through them. In light of what I was shooting with at the time, you could say I suffered from a touch of Pentax envy.

I thought it was crap then; I think it's crap now.

But here we are in the D I G I T A L Age!! Now the morons sling around these things that look like trench mortars and babble away about megapixels and a mishmash of acronymic poop that no alphabet should be asked to support. The cameras themselves (if you can call them that) produce ... well ... pictures. But then the geniuses can shove all this stuff into their computers and manipulate the images into cheap, plastic imitations of art. If there's any artistry there, I'll show you some pimple-faced kid masturbating away with an XBOX game.

No, I think I see it the same way as the chap I quoted above. Instant gratification is a tempting thing, but learning to sublimate it is part of growing up

OK, digitheads, start taking shots.

A Meditation on the Passage of Time; Or, Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May

2010-02-07T08:09:00.010-05:00

IT WAS October, 1978, and Halloween was coming. The girls and I spent a lovely warm afternoon at the picnic table in the back yard turning three of four pumpkins into Jack O'Lanterns, as you see on the right. Sadly, in our household, Halloween fell by the wayside that year, when Mom had a meltdown and fetched up in the hospital thanks to an unspeakably ugly episode with some members of her family a week or so earlier. The girls had their Halloween with my parents in the Philadelphia area while I minded the homestead on my own. I didn't revisit the Jack O'Lanterns until just before Thanksgiving that year. The only pumpkin not showing the ravages of decay and the passage of time was the one which had escaped the knife that lovely October afternoon. Funny thing, the passage of time. Sometimes we don't notice it until too late. In this case, life went on, and here I sit looking back at some pictures of a long-gone autumn, wistfully realizing I'll never get those moments back, except in the form of a pair of images formed as part of an interaction between light and a chemical process.

Clear as Eternity

2010-02-02T17:45:00.003-05:00

The wind blew in straight from the Pole, or so it seemed. Not blade-sharp, but blunt and heavy, like a Kiowa war club. Dry leaves and snarling snow squalls hurried before, as if in haste to outrun it. The thickest sheepskin and greasewool were not enough to turn aside the assault of this wind; the stoutest fur-lined sealskin boots and mittens couldn’t keep feet and hands from aching and going numb. Life itself retreated into the depths of Sarah Dawson. She sensed only a spark of warmth deep inside her, cowering away from the sweep of the black roaring void which had snuffed the sun. The sudden temperature drop seemed a surprise at first. Surprise? No. Granny Synnestvedt had looked at the sky – when was that? Yesterday? This morning? Back in Canebrake. She’d looked at the sky with her cataract-fogged hazel eyes. “Blue Norther,” she’d said. “I smell it. Blue Norther. Comin’ down on us sure as hell fire. Winter ain’t over yet, chickadee. You best stay right where you’re at till she blows through.” She sniffed the wind and cackled like an old broody hen over the last egg she’d ever lay. But Granny Synnestvedt had got on Sarah’s nerves so bad it was going to take more than a late winter storm to keep her cooped up in that musty old bungalow in Canebrake. Shut up tight since the end of October, the place reeked of age, rancid cabbage and decay. Shades pulled down, even in daylight the interior was shadowy as the lukewarm shallows of a prehistoric sea, where Granny, a rippling transparent ctenophore, glided from room to room. For days on end, the only sound in the place was the keening of the prairie wind – and Granny’s chuckling as she talked to herself – or to someone Sarah couldn't see. Sarah Dawson announced she must leave, Blue Norther or no. “I’m warnin’ you, child. No, I’m beggin’ you.” Granny rubbed her hands together with a sound of grasshoppers’ wings. “Stay till the weather clears. I see a awful visitation of Satan’s angels comin’ on us. Stay another three days.” “I got to go, Granny. Been here too long. You was kind to put me up through the cold months, but I got family waitin’ on me. I’ll be fine. I’ve rode fence lines in a snowstorm before. Don’t you worry about me.” *** The roan mare rolled her eyes, showing the whites. She got skittish when Sarah tried to saddle her. Granny stood in the barn doorway and watched, her face closed up like a shuttered dark lantern. “Horse senses it,” she muttered. “Horse can already hear the wind a hundred mile away. Horse don’t want to die out there on the storm’s anvil.” Sarah finally backed the mare into a corner and threw the saddle over her back. It was a Spanish leather saddle, a gift from her father, with her initials tooled into the right stirrup flap.

“Quit it, Gran. Enough of that nonsense. Look at that sky. It’s as clear as eternity. Sun’s getting warmer every day. I’m going and that’s that.” The mare whinnied and stamped and rolled her eyes as Sarah cinched the saddle. “If you ain’t going to mind me, you should at least mind the horse,” Granny said. “Not another word.” “Horse knows. Oh, yes. Horse knows. You say that sky’s clear as eternity? Even with these old eyes I see the darkness in the north.” *** Sarah Dawson rode out that morning, Granny’s predictions notwithstanding – over the illusory flatness of the earth toward where the prairie and the sky made a straight line of demarcation between them, following the sun’s trajectory toward dusk. About ten miles out, Sarah looked to her right, startled, perhaps, by something she thought she heard – the suggestion of storm-tossed surf or a high-speed freight train in the distance. Sarah looked, saw nothing of interest in the near distance; then she gazed into the bright northern sky. And there it was: a thin band of purple just above the horizon – a bruise on the face of heaven. Bit of weather shaping up? Maybe. Sarah recalled Granny’s warnings and dug her heels into the mare’s flanks. “Git up, Gertie.” She clicked her tongue and slapped the reins against the horse’s withers. “We’ll make Yankton by nightfall.” Sarah shuddered slightly. The sun, she noticed, though still high in the sky – about an hour past noon, she figured – had lost a good bit of its warmth. She looked northward again. The thin band of purple now looked like a mountain ridge. She felt a puff of cold wind, a cat’s paw, like the first tentative probing of a boxer sizing up a sparring partner in the ring. The grass rippled, the blades showing their pale undersides. Then it hit. *** According to the almanac, the blizzard of March 18-19, 1903 “smote the Dakotas with the fury of an avenging angel.” When the earth re-emerged from beneath its mantle of ice in the second week of May, vultures feasted on acres of carcasses – a smorgasbord of bison, steer, bull, sheep, coyote and whatever else raised its stink into the springtime air. A wandering rodeo bum found a fine Spanish leather saddle and tack amid some maggot-crawling remains about fifteen miles west of Canebrake. The initials S.D. had been tooled into the leather, which came back nicely with lots of saddle soap and elbow grease. The cowpoke took a hot iron and obliterated the initials, substituting his own on the opposite flap. One breezy afternoon in June, Granny Synnestvedt sat on her front porch with her grandson Jad Parsons from the Lazy B Ranch. She sniffed the air. “Twisters.” Granny’s voice rasped as she lit her corncob pipe. “Twisters. Big ‘uns. And lightning. You best get your livestock under cover an’ pray for deliverance.” “Aw, come on, Gran,” Jad said. “There ain’t no twisters out there. Look at that sky. It’s clear as eternity.”

Time for a (you should excuse the expression) CHANGE.

2010-01-29T08:37:00.002-05:00

OK, I've soaked you long enough in the incredible drama of my busted big toe -- so long, in fact, that the toe has been good as new for weeks. It's time for some new material. What might that be, you ask? I'm workin' on it. Stay tuned.

New Tread on an Aging Jalopy

2010-01-11T14:50:00.004-05:00

It started on the last day of 2009, when my foot doctor split open the big toe on my right foot like a sausage being readied for the grill. He pulled out enough surplus bone and other junk to fill a shot glass, as he put it. Then he sewed me up and I spent the next two weeks hobbling around on one of those big sandal things, which was a great excuse to park in handicapped spaces, avoid shoveling snow, and spend hours in the sun room with my foot on the table, reading, dozing off, and reading some more. I finished Edgar Sawtelle (David Wroblewski) and Kill the Devil (T.K. Marion), and I'm well into The Russian Concubine (Kate Furnivall) and started on Winter's Tale (Mark Helprin). It's been a while since I've felt relaxed enough for such a glut of reading, but now it may become a habit again. I might even resume work on my stalled second novel. The doctor removed the stitches from my foot this morning, and it's good to be wearing shoes on both feet again. But it will also be good to keep putting that foot on the table and plunging into that grand old-fashioned pastime of liberating the spirit by way of the well-written word.

The many uses of a surfboard

2010-01-01T10:10:00.006-05:00

I'll bet you thought they were just for riding waves. Actually, a rented surfboard in the hands of three imaginative young lads is capable of so many other expressive possibilities...

...such as striking poses and eliciting comments...

... or simply striking poses -- and attracting large carnivorous hairs...

... or significantly enhancing one's stature in the world.

I took these pictures just about exactly 45 years ago, during a 1965 family Christmas vacation in Delray Beach, Florida. As you can see from the beach shots, the waves weren't very good for surfing that day, so it really was fortunate that we had such fertile imaginations

Anyway, happy new year, everyone!

The Solstice is Past

2009-12-23T08:48:00.004-05:00

The earth is journeying back toward the summer solstice in its perennial voyage around the sun, and the days are already growing incrementally longer. It's always struck me odd that we mark the beginning of winter by the moment that happens. Yet we all know the bulk of the weather patterns we associate with winter are still to come. The good news is that, by this time in January 2010, we'll have roughly 30 more minutes of daylight, and more to come each day until late June. Best wishes to all my readers at this holiday season built around the winter solstice, and best wishes, too, for a happy, healthy prosperous new year!

Hairdressing chez Chateau Page

2009-12-19T20:01:00.008-05:00

Back in the winter of 1964, I took a brief fling at hairdressing for discriminating ladies of impeccable taste and ... uh ... je ne sais quoi (which is French for "I don't know what I'm talking about.") I was young and stupid then. Yes, yes, the only thing that's changed is I'm not young any more. Anyway, here is Monsieur making a high fashion statement with the coiffure of Mademoiselle. Mademoiselle WHO, you ask? Mademoiselle none o' your business, I say. Well, here you go...

The lady in question was simply delighted with the outcome of this daring fashion departure, as you see... And eventually danced the night away with a dashing young prince, who later became an obstetrician.... I love to think I played a role in this heartwarming drama. Oh, by the way, the thing with the prince and Mademoiselle never came to its warmly-anticipated fruition. But it WAS fun while it lasted.

And, instead of being a hairdresser, I practiced law for ... oh ... several decades. Eventually I got it right -- mostly. The law part, I mean.

Ain't life great??

A Holiday Pome

2009-12-18T08:35:00.003-05:00

How about a nice cheezy Holiday Poem? OK, here goes... Happy Holidays! Season's Greetings! Christmas? Hell no, ACLU's bleating. Frosty's blaring in the malls, Crazed shoppers bouncing off the walls. We're rockin' around the (bleep-bleep) tree, While gagging on Diversity. The important thing is Buying Stuff, and Stuff and Stuff and Still More Stuff To strew beneath the (bleep-bleep) tree Belaboring Diversity. Baby Jesus? Forget that crap! We've got lots of Stuff to wrap 'Cuz here comes Santa Claus, Here Comes Santa Claus... *** Oops! There goes Santa Claus And to all a good night. Tomorrow we'll join the herd and haul All this Stuff back to the mall, And trade it in for still more Stuff. Pardon this doggerel; it's rather rough.

Cambridge, then and Now

2009-12-10T21:30:00.006-05:00

In the early spring (read: late winter) of 1964, back when the Beatles were a startling new phenomenon in the pop music world, back when very few people much knew or cared where some place called "Vietnam" was located, I came with a gang of would-be Dartmouth College athletes from Hanover, New Hampshire (where the Connecticut River was still frozen) to Cambridge, Massachusetts. We were guests of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which bedded us down in the field house and let us launch our eight-oared shells from the MIT boathouse on the Charles River. We were training for the 1964 collegiate rowing season. On a calm day, as you see, the Charles was a fairly pleasant place to skim over the water... We never really amounted to much as a force to reckon with in collegiate rowing circles that year, but we worked hard at it and had fun -- and some of us damn near flunked out of the college. Eve and I went to Cambridge over Thanksgiving to spend the holiday with my daughters and their families. From our eighth-floor hotel room, we had a view of the Charles Basin that brought back some memories of those long-gone undergraduate days... Here's the Thanksgiving crew (minus yours truly, who was behind the camera, and Nora, who was slung on her father's back) on our Saturday trek from MIT to the Institute for Contemporary Art on the Boston waterfront -- a hike of no small distance on a cool, windy day. Well, I may be getting older, but I can still keep up with these kids who weren't even around back when I was pulling an oar on the dear old Charles.

Columbus Day at the Shore, Take II

2009-10-31T08:50:00.006-04:00

Some folks commented on my last post, which mentioned Springer's ice cream shop in Stone Harbor, NJ. Here's what it looked like on October 12, 2009: For some reason, my most lasting memory of Springer's involves eating ice cream cones with my parents and my two brothers in the parking lot one balmy evening in around 1954 or '55. I was partial to coffee ice cream then (still am), and my brothers and I were competing to see who could make his cone last the longest. I finished my ice cream through the pointy end of the cone, because it had been reduced to soup, but I won the first and last Page Family Ice Cream Cone Endurance Olympics. After that contest, the event was scratched as too foolish even for us. Here's another Stone Harbor landmark. I've never been in the place, but its logo appeared on T-shirts all over the world (slight exaggeration here, folks) for a few years in the decade of the 1990s: After we'd satisfied the urge to make sure the town of Stone Harbor was essentially just the way we left it last year, we drove down to the southern end of Seven Mile Beach, where the old Coast Guard lifesaving station still stands. Back in my boyhood, it stood in solitary splendor among the sand dunes; today, you'd miss it altogether unless you were specifically looking for it, because it's surrounded by residential properties and serves only as a point of historic interest. But we wandered on down to the ocean, pausing for a self-portrait at the beach access ramp. Cute couple, eh? Ah, so. Next time we'll pop up somewhere else. Until then, blessings.

Columbus Day at the Shore

2009-10-27T08:13:00.008-04:00

Once again this year, our great friends Dennis and Penny Murphy hosted us at the South Jersey shore over the Columbus Day weekend. The weather was near-perfect; and, after a nostalgic visit to sleepy, post-season Sea Isle City... ...we gave the sun permission to set over the last vestige of Summer 2009 by the seaside -- or, in this case, the bayside. My fondness for the South Jersey shore goes back into the late '40s and early '50s, when our family -- often joined by another family with kids roughly the same age as my brothers and me -- would rent one or more beach houses at Stone Harbor or Avalon. Dad was on vacation and therefore relaxing more and more each day. The proof came when he pulled out his trusty pocket knife and started whittling; or when he'd organize a driftwood search so we could build a beachcomber's shack; or when he'd make us a kite to touch the heavens on a breezy day. This was soon enough after the end of World War II so that there was plenty of interesting flotsam on the beach from torpedoed ships -- and plenty of "tar", as people called the congealed bunker fuel oil that washed up on the beach and got all over us. In those days, the magnificent sand dunes along Seven Mile Beach were still mostly unregulated and not yet reduced to private gated compounds dominated by coyly hidden seaside palaces for the filthy rich. It was still OK (or at least not ABSOLUTELY forbidden!) to build a driftwood fire in a sheltered sandy hollow, among the sawgrass and low-lying tree shrubs, and roast hot dogs and marshmallows while savoring the joys of youth and freedom and grains of sand in our food. Later, in our teen-age years, a certain amount of innocent but urgent romance flourished in those magical places. Long sunny days at the beach and in the ocean might be followed by evenings on the modest boardwalks, movies at the small theatres and ice cream at Springer's in Stone Harbor. Precious memories, every one. Oops! Time for me to pull myself together and get to the office. The real world awaits, so now I'll wrap the nostalgia carefully back into its cocoon, to pull it out and marvel at it later.

Our First Apartment

2009-10-23T21:49:00.002-04:00

WOW!! Pretty exciting image, eh? Right after I left active Naval duty and settled in Philadelphia, this is what our apartment looked like in 1972. We made quite a cozy place of this third-floor walk-up, before events led us onward into the future. I'm posting this photo only to test a new Epson Perfection V300 photo scanner, which is about as close as I ever intend to come to the digital claptrap which seems to be all the rage nowadays. Monochrome Forever!

USS WAYNE E. MEYER (DDG 108)

2009-10-14T22:39:00.008-04:00

One of the more impressive events of a lifetime is to witness the commissioning of a United States warship. This past Saturday, October 10, 2009, Eve and I were among the invited guests at the commissioning of USS Wayne E. Meyer (DDG-108), the latest addition to our Pacific Fleet. Because Admiral Wayne Meyer had connections with the City of Philadelphia and environs, the commissioning took place at Penn's Landing, and here are some views of our most recent guided missile destroyer on that day... Preparing to read orders... A pair of squared-away bluejackets... The crew goes aboard. Crew manning the rail at the after quarterdeck; Ben Franklin Bridge in the background. Hand salute from ship's company. It was a day that made me proud of my long-ago Navy days. After that, we went to visit some dear friends at Sea Isle City, NJ... And if you can tell me why life ain't just wonderful, please do. I won't believe you if you try.

Yet ANOTHER Pretty Girl

2009-10-04T20:33:00.003-04:00

Meet Lilliputnikskaya. She came to our house in early summer 2008. Before that, she'd lived under someone's porch and had become quite wise in the ways of the world. We were on a 90-day probationary program when she arrived; but, after an intensive screening and a thorough background check, she allowed us to become members of her household staff. We are well aware that this is strictly employment at will: missed meals and shortages of bedtime snacks are not looked upon kindly. So far, we've stayed on her good side, but eternal vigilance is the price of a happy cat-human relationship.

Another Pretty Girl (but DEFINITELY not No. 1)

2009-09-30T17:21:00.003-04:00

I was getting a little tired of those dreary old dead-of-winter photos. Therefore, I assume you were, too. Here's a girl whom I met for the duration of a shutter-click at an outdoor market festival in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, in July 2008. Not only did she let me take her picture, but she lit up the viewfinder with the smile you see above. Too bad I didn't know about this gambit (or was too shy to use it) when I was young enough for it to blossom into something -- maybe.

Winter in Drydock, 1968-1969

2009-09-20T17:55:00.007-04:00

During the winter of 1968-1969, USS Suffolk County (LST-1173) was being overhauled at the Horne Brothers shipyard in Newport News, Virginia. At night in winter, a naval shipyard can be quite an otherworldly-looking place: Four fellow junior officers and I rented a cottage in Virginia Beach -- a good 45-minute commute from the shipyard -- and lived there when we weren't on duty aboard ship. Virginia Beach is a lively seashore town most of the year, but here's what it looked like at night in January 1969: Main drag, downtown. Beach promenade. Winter is cold and dark pretty much wherever you go in non-tropical latitudes, it seems. We burned a lot of firewood in that little cottage -- and a lot of scrap wood we liberated from a nearby demolition site. Quite the band of jolly buccaneers, we were. At least we got away with it (most of the time). Those were the days. Cherish them, cherish them.

Hiking in the Chagrin River Valley and Other Adventures

2009-09-10T22:39:00.011-04:00

Over Labor Day weekend, Eve and I visited my daughter Janet and her husband Steve in Chagrin Falls, Ohio. On Saturday morning, we took a hike in the Chagrin River Valley, through some beautiful meadows and hardwood forests. Here they are at an observation platform where we had a close encounter with a baby muskrat in one of the wetland areas, but the little twerp took a powder when I aimed my camera in his or her direction. Later in the day we visited the Great Geauga County Fair, where we saw some charming alpacas... ...and llamas And we ate lots of deep-fried country-fair fare -- funnel cakes, deep-fried Oreos, deep-fried Snickers bars, sausage sandwiches with grilled onions and peppers -- all of which I will never tell my cardiologist. And if you do, I'll deny it; then I'll hunt you down and feed you to radioactive cockroaches. The next day we toured the wine country along the south shore of Lake Erie, and we fetched up on a breezy terrace overlooking the lake and sampling some local wines... And the next day we came home. How was YOUR weekend, Dear Reader?

My No. 1 Girl Friend -- No Kidding; Cross My Heart And Hope to Die

2009-09-07T17:44:00.001-04:00

It took some doing, but I am now blessed with a life companion who understands me -- not an easy task, believe me. A couple of days ago, she noticed I was howling, beating my chest, and posting a parade of photos of some women who played minor roles in my past life (well, they're minor now, having passed into whatever they've passed into). The rolling pin stayed in the kitchen drawer, and the back-seat driving became only a wee bit more shrill. Anyway, here she is -- living proof that the trial-and-error method works. After a lot of false starts, here's the one that worked...

"NO DIVING"

2009-09-01T08:16:00.003-04:00

This is what happens when a photographer is in the right place at the right split second with the right equipment. Outside the border of this severely cropped (unfortunately) digital scan is a sign which says, quite clearly, "No Diving." Our young hero, however, seems to be training for the Olympic Mens' 10-Meter Platform Diving event. Photo made in September 1969 at the Currituck Ferry landing on Knotts Island, North Carolina. And so we chemically grab and hold onto the blink of an eye 40 years ago. Monochrome Forever!!

Holly, 1971

2009-08-29T17:40:00.004-04:00

Continuing in the Hopeless Romantic vein, here's a shot of the girl I married in 1971. In the final analysis, that was a sad story, but with the totally joyous sub-plot of two lovely daughters who have since made happy marriages of their own. I took this picture inside a Chester County barn, where a shaft of sunlight from a hole in the roof back-lighted the subject and bits of hay dust floated about her head. With my penchant for nostalgia, I can tell you it was a very happy day, showing no foreshadowing of things to come -- things best left unmentioned here.

Energy Then and Now

2009-08-22T17:20:00.002-04:00

The foreground image is the Philadelphia and Reading Coal Company's St. Nicholas coal breaker in Mahanoy Township, PA, no longer a going concern. In the background are wind turbines on the ridge above Shenandoah, PA, which are helping to reduce the dependency on anthracite coal (still in abundant supply) for the generation of electric power.

Uh...Harrumph...He Clears his Throat

2009-08-16T21:39:00.002-04:00

I guess my youthful heart has been hanging out there on my sleeve long enough. Time to come up with some more pithy, hard-hitting blogmanship before somebody accuses me of being ... gasp ... a Romantic. L'Uomo Universale, c'est-moi.

Kidney Stone Update

2009-08-12T09:37:00.002-04:00

It's still there, an ugly little knot of pain down on the lower left, just south of the navel and north of the delicate region. Had another CT scan last night, and I'll be seeing a specialist in a few days. In the meantime... Groan... Chin up, Old Man.

The Latest Ailment of Advancing Age

2009-08-05T11:18:00.002-04:00

I'm getting suspicious of Philadelphia -- or maybe paranoid is the word I'm looking for. Six years ago almost to the day, I was standing up in the Philadelphia division of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania speaking on behalf of a client, when I suddenly experienced what it must feel like to be kicked in the belly by a mule. Diverticulitis! An intestinal blockage of intensity and pain I wouldn't wish on even that tinhorn corporate micro-midget who had me so mad several weeks ago. But time passed and the medical care system worked its wonders. After two major abdominal operations and the considerable indignity of pooping into a leaky colostomy bag for three months, it appeared my old chocolate channel was back in tip-top shape. Yesterday I was sitting in a roomful of people attending the August 2009 Philadelphia Sheriff's judicial sale of foreclosed properties, bidding on behalf of a client. And yes, friends, that damn mule came along and kicked me in the gut again. It felt just like what I remembered of that diverticulitis attack of yesteryear. So once again I drove home from Philadelphia in extreme discomfort, only this time dreading a repeat of past sufferings. After a brief eternity in the emergency room waiting area, the requisite inquiries into my insurance coverages, more waiting, the surrender of several gallons of blood, more waiting, an X-ray, more waiting, a CT scan and more waiting, all made bearable by a couple of hits of morphine, I received the medics' verdict ... Kidney stone. Great was the rejoicing in my heart at that pronouncement! No surgery! No leaky colostomy bag! Just a day or two of gritting my teeth while the offending bit of crystalline matter works its way through the system -- like a golf ball through a garden hose -- and leaves me a free man once again. At least until the next time I go to Philadelphia.

BURP!!

2009-07-30T17:30:00.005-04:00

There's a restaurant called "Rosy Tomorrows" in Danbury, CT, just off Interstate 84; Eve and I have dined there from time to time on our periodic trips to and from New England. We stopped there for lunch on our way to Boston in June. The Tower of Onion Rings was one of the eye-catchers on the menu and we, craving greasy fried foods more than our doctors would have liked, took the bait. We finished the whole thing, too. Very tasty at the time, but viciously vengeful in the aftermath. It would have been a bumpy night even if we hadn't been sleeping on an air mattress in my daughter's apartment.

Life is Good, With the Right Altitude

2009-07-23T20:06:00.004-04:00

We encountered this young lady at the Life is Good Festival on the Common in Boston on June 20th. I was hoping she'd turn to face me, but I had to settle for a high-elevation posterior shot. I didn't even notice the "Mr. Nut Roasted" sign until I pulled the print out of the soup. I'm still trying to come up with a clever connection; but, the way my mind works, it wouldn't be suitable for a family-oriented blog.

Reinholds Inn

2009-07-20T17:39:00.002-04:00

Here's a view of the Reinholds Inn in Reinholds, PA, about 10 miles from where I live. It's a favorite spot for the biker crowd to go for wings, burgers and beer on a Sunday afternoon. See the cat in the middle window upstairs? It's a ceramic tiger. Just thought you'd like to know.

Nora Jeanne Molyneaux, Take III

2009-07-16T08:33:00.003-04:00

Oh, my GAWD!! Yes, she's definitely prettier than that nasty old Soviet ammo-carrier in the last post. Here's another shot from our visit with our sweet little granddaughter several weeks ago...

Вели́кая Оте́чественная война́

2009-07-11T09:06:00.009-04:00

The Velikaya Otyechestvennaya Voyna arguably stands as the high-water mark of Soviet patriotism from the 1917 revolution until the days of Sputnik and the manned Earth orbit of Yuri Gagarin. The fellow in the photograph was one of the Soviet reenactors at the Mid-Atlantic Air Museum's 2009 World War II weekend at the Reading Regional Airport on the first weekend in June. The uniform appears to be naval, but I'm curious about the death's head insignia on the left sleeve (I didn't get a chance to ask at the time I took the picture). If any reader of this feuilleton happens to know anything about Soviet uniforms of the Great Patriotic War, I'd welcome some information. Whatever the full explanation, it's quite clear this chap is well-armed, assuming he has some kind of a mechanism for aiming and firing the ammunition he wears with such obvious pride.

Nora Jeanne Molyneaux, Take II

2009-07-08T08:28:00.002-04:00

At the Life Is Good Festival, Boston Common, June 20, 2009. Who's Imitating Whom? Vocalizing, June 20, 2009, Boston, MA. You were warned several days ago. Grandfatherhood is bringing out the Daddy in me, and one of the results is photographs like the above, which I took during a visit to Lindsay and her family in Cambridge at the end of June. So, among the nostalgia pix I plaster up on this wall, from time to time you'll see up-to-the-minute images of persons and things I find significant in the moment. In the words of the promoters of the June 20 Boston Common festival, life, indeed, is good.

"Tinhorns, Cheapskates & Stuffed Shirts"

2009-07-03T12:26:00.004-04:00

There's a place in Washington State's San Juan Islands called Boat Harbor. Back in 1966, a family named the Kendalls owned it. They maintained a rickety boat landing dock, but did not necessarily welcome visitors, as witness the rather poorly preserved photograph above. Despite the fact that the Kendalls were not famous for their hospitality, my Seattle relatives and I tied up at the Boat Harbor dock one July day and went ashore for a visit. Of course, we dispatched one of my young cousins up to the haunted-looking house on the hill overlooking the harbor to pay the landing fee; we could afford it because we had no stuffed shirts or cheapskates aboard. After consulting the Ship's Dictionary (American Heritage) for a definition of "tinhorn" (a petty braggart, esp. a gambler, who pretends to be wealthier than he is), we decided none of us fit that category, either. Interesting place, that Boat Harbor, with some sort of a history (which I don't recall in any detail) as a base for pirates or smugglers or other shady swashbuckling types, and the wreckage of a square-rigged vessel set into a concrete foundation along the shore. From this distant perspective in time, I wonder how much, if at all, the landing fees have gone up. Or whether the place has been overrun by tinhorns, cheapskates and stuffed shirts. I can't seem to find the Boat Harbor Yacht Club anywhere in cyberspace.

"Good Ale, Raw Onions, No Women"

2009-06-26T08:18:00.004-04:00

On a dreary day in March 1966, the slogan "Good Ale, Raw Onions, No Women" still described the bill of fare at McSorley's Old Ale House on the Bowery in New York City. Since then, the "No Women" feature has passed into history, swept into the maelstrom of feminist sentiment that arose not too long after I took this picture. But if you thought the advent of female customers changed anything about the place except the gender of its clientele, you'd be wrong. The folklore is that the joint still hasn't been cleaned since 1854 -- except as necessary to comply with public-health ordinances. For a gang of Dartmouth College lads on the loose in the city, McSorley's was an indispensable stop on the road to ... well ... whatever came next. For many of us, it was military service during the Vietnam years. Ladies and gentlemen, here's a toast to our youth: Not entirely misspent, we hope! A postscript: An anonymous commentator has insisted that the slogan was "Good Ale, Raw Onions, and No Ladies." I wouldn't swear to anything on the strength of my memory alone, so I'm going to leave the title of this posting as it is, acknowledging all along that I may be dead wrong. Wouldn't be the first time, nor will it be the last.

Nora Jeanne Molyneaux

2009-06-25T10:51:00.002-04:00

Okay, now you're in for it. It's time for old Gramps to start hauling out granddaughter pictures and shoving them in your face, like it or not. This shot of Nora is actually now about a year old, but it gives you some sense of how much she loves to eat....

(Grand) Father's Day in Harvard Yard

2009-06-25T07:56:00.002-04:00

Every year, my birthday (June 18) coincides closely with Father's Day (this year, June 21). Last Thursday, Eve and I made the arduous trek from home to Cambridge, Mass., 360 miles of traffic-choked frustration. Notwithstanding the travelers' woes, however, we had a wonderful visit with my daughter Lindsay and granddaughter Nora Jeanne. We also caught a fleeting glimpse of Nora's father Brad, but he's in the indentured servitude called a first-year medical residency at Mass General; we stopped by the hospital and caught a few moments with him wearing his scrubs -- which look uncannily like a prison uniform. Lindsay and family live in an apartment in Grays Hall on the Harvard campus, and a sweeter venue you could not imagine. She's an instructor (Statistics), a Ph.D. candidate (Education Policy) and a freshman proctor at Harvard. I'm rather proud of her, just in case you were wondering. At 18 months, Nora has begun to develop a vocabulary, starting with "No." She's a sweet little thing with a smile that lights up her face like a tropical sunrise. No doubt you'll see some pictures here whenever I get around to posting them. All too soon, the weekend was over, and we made the homeward voyage. Here we are, back in that warm quotidian bath.

Why "Son of a Curmudgeon"? (Reprise)

2009-06-16T07:58:00.001-04:00

Over the years, people have called me a son of many things, most of them based on my supposed relationship to female dogs. But why a Son of a Curmudgeon? It started one winter day, just before Christmas, in the early 1960s. Our family had gathered in the living room. My brothers and I were taking bets on whether or not the Christmas tree would remain standing under the onslaught of Mom’s relentless tinkering with the ornaments and placement of the lights. Everyone was in a festive, poisonous humor. The language was quite inappropriate for the season. We decided to take a break for family photos. What a great idea! I can’t remember which moron came up with it, but at least it promised to sidetrack momentarily the strife over the tree. We started with Dad. We sat him in a straight-backed chair, handed him a walking stick, and told him to look as crusty and disagreeable as he could -- not a difficult assignment under the circumstances -- while one of us took the picture. I wish I could show you the result, but it's lost to posterity, more's the pity. Pop looked like one of those sourpussed elderly gentlemen you sometimes see in old studio photographs, their necks clamped in steel and celluloid to prevent the slightest appearance of comfort or relaxation. From the day it came back from the photo shop to the day it vanished into the ether, that portrait was titled “Curmudgeon.” Dad decided he enjoyed the role and refined it considerably during the remainder of his life. Happily, he could toggle it on and off at will, and never lost his capacity to enjoy or share a good joke or a conversation. As the years go by, I find myself wondering if curmudgeonliness might not be an inherited trait. There are times I feel an almost overwhelming urge to growl at someone.

Another Sentimental Journey

2009-06-11T07:59:00.002-04:00

Here's a rainy-day photo I made on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, during a trip there in 1970 (actually, it was my first honeymoon, may that marriage and my late ex-wife rest in peace). It was the last time I visited that part of the world. I would love to see Cape Breton on one of the two or three sunny days that occur up there during the year, but these things are hard to plan for.

The Famous Virginia Beach Daisy Chain

2009-06-02T18:55:00.003-04:00

Maybe someday I'll get tired of telling tall tales about my Navy days, but not yet. I'm sure you'll get tired of it before I do. Anyway, during the winter of 1968-1969, while our ship was in drydock for a major overhaul, four of my fellow junior officers and I rented a quaint little house in Virginia Beach, from a sweet little old lady who I'm sure lived to regret her decision to lease the place to us. To keep a rough tally of beers consumed on the premises, we made a daisy chain out of our aluminum pop-tops (remember those?), and placed the end in the flower basket of the rosy-cheeked young lass in the picture, who occupied the living-room mantel along with other bits of bric-a-brac. By the end of the winter, that chain circled the living room and was starting to creep up to the second floor. I'm surprised our landlady didn't see to it we were court-martialed.

First Pennsylvania Home

2009-05-31T21:24:00.003-04:00

Here's a shot of our family's first home in Pennsylvania, just after we moved from Detroit to West Conshohocken in 1949. I was four years old, and my two brothers had not yet been born -- although they came along pretty quickly after we got settled. The place was called "Stoney Creek Farm," and it was on River Road. That road is no more, having been superseded by the Schuylkill Expressway over the next several years; this was the prime reason we moved away from Stoney Creek Farm. If you're ever driving east on the Schuylkill Expressway (toward Philadelphia, for the compass-challenged), if you look to your right just before you come to the Conshohocken Curve, you can see this house nestled in the woods and overgrowth directly across the river from the old Lee Tire plant. So what, you say? I don't know. Maybe I'm getting to that age where my nostalgia becomes everyone else's burden.

Author for a Cause

2009-05-28T09:11:00.008-04:00

You may recall a couple of blurbs on this blog back in March about the "Author for a Cause" book-signing event at the GoggleWorks in Reading. I took some pictures, which I offer here for your perusal. Being a certified Darkroom Dinosaur, it takes me a while to slosh everything around in those magic chemicals (especially if I'm not in any particular hurry to get it done), but here you go. Above: T.K. Marion (Kill the Devil) and Sue Lange (Tritcheon Hash; We, Robots). Above: Diana Mulligan, Sue Lange Above: Carol Haile and Admirer. Above: Carol Haile responding to bagpiper. Above: Carol Haile and T.K. Marion.

OLD MAUCH CHUNK

2009-05-23T13:36:00.003-04:00

If you know me at all, you know the Pennsylvania anthracite coal region fascinates me; if you don't know me at all, now you know at least this much. I never actually lived there, but I have ancestors who did, and it seems the family ties keep calling me back. Following that call, I went on a little frolic yesterday 50 miles north into Carbon County, to the town of Jim Thorpe, which I prefer to know as Old Mauch Chunk, its former Indian-derived name. The name means "Bear Mountain". My ancestor Thomas Clemson North lived there for a time, and I understand he managed and operated a wire factory in the town. He married Harriet Belford, the daughter of a magisterial judge. Yesterday, I wandered several miles north along the railroad line that runs beside the Lehigh River on the western bank. Twenty miles north (no, I didn't walk that far) is the coal transshipment town of White Haven, named for Josiah White, one of the pioneers of the anthracite industry. A slight overcast tempered but did not extinguish the warmth of the sun; the river was running strong and flashed white rapids as it tumbled over the rocks in the Lehigh Gorge. I was trying to absorb the spirit of the place, because it figures highly in Book Two of my Up Home novel series. Mauch Chunk reeks history. Unbelievable as it may seem, in the golden era of the anthracite, railroad, canal and quarrying industries in Pennsylvania, the town rivaled Niagara Falls as a tourist destination and resort retreat. It sits in a valley among steep mountains, and has been called "Little Switzerland" by travel promoters perhaps given to a touch of hyperbole. Asa Packer, the founder of Lehigh University and the Lehigh Valley Railroad, made his home there -- a grand Victorian mansion overlooking the town -- and endowed one of the wealthiest parishes of the Episcopal Church in the Diocese of Bethlehem. I like the place.

GOUT

2009-05-19T21:23:00.002-04:00

Just when you think things couldn't possibly get any worse, something comes along to take your mind clean off the troubles you thought you had. Yesterday, without warning, my left ankle puffed up to about twice its normal size, and began to feel as if it was full of broken glass. I hardly slept last night, limping from my bed to the medicine chest every hour from 3:00 to 7:00 for another colchicine tablet. It was a crippling attack of gout, which I always thought was an affliction of old Englishmen who ate too well and drank too much port. My doctor blamed it on a shrimp dinner I had on Sunday, and prescribed some wonder drugs which seem to have brought the monster under control -- at least for the time being. Thank God. I don't want to repeat that ordeal.

KVETCHING

2009-05-18T13:58:00.010-04:00

Good name in man and woman, dear my lord, Is the immediate jewel of their souls: Who steals my purse steals trash; ‘tis something, nothing; ‘Twas mine, ‘tis his, and has been slave to thousands; But he that filches from me my good name Robs me of that which not enriches him, And makes me poor indeed.

---Othello, III,iii,155 I learned recently that some miserable little piss-ant corporate Caesar in a position of power that enables him on a whim to ruin reputations and destroy careers has chucked me into outer darkness and declared my name anathema among the pathetic flunkies who must kowtow to him, lest they suffer the same fate. No one has favored me with a catalogue of my alleged offenses, nor am I in a position to request one. No, I must guess at the charges against me (so much for the right to confront one's accuser), and it's not a pleasant pastime. The affair has been most painful. In the dark hours between midnight and dawn, one tends to imagine scenarios of complete collapse and ruin. No, damn it, I’m not whining. Yes, yes, I might as well be barking at the moon, I know; instead, I'm barking in cyberspace. Please indulge me. A good irrational pissed-off rant (which certainly qualifies as looking foolish) is good for the soul (see above). This sort of development helps one understand how, in the more brutal days of yesteryear, palace intrigues and malicious lies often spawned murders of vengeance -- not that any such thing has crossed my mind, needless to say. Ah, well, rough with the smooth and all that, I suppose. I'll get over it. Like the contents of my colon, this too will pass. Have a nice day.

Port Angeles, WA, August 1966

2009-04-29T15:09:00.004-04:00

It was late in the day, and tomorrow we'd be on our way back to another work week in Seattle. We'd fished all over the Juan de Fuca Strait, and caught nothing but sunburn. Several hundred yards off Port Angeles, with the Olympic Mountains catching a full dose of the setting sun's rays, I decided I might as well throw a line over and see what I might catch by trolling. What the hell, we might as well let the crabs on the bottom have what's left of our bait, I thought.

When the fish hit, it's a wonder I didn't lose all my tackle overboard, so great was the surprise. It took a good hard 45 minutes, and a lot of help from my shipmates to land the thing, but it was a 40-pound King salmon, and the perfect end to what I had almost dismissed as a day so uneventful as to be downright boring.

I didn't get back up into the San Juan Islands again that summer, but my Seattle relatives had a pretty good portion of the fish frozen and shipped to me back East, where it made a number of unforgettable meals.

Things like this are what make a life a LIFE. I don't think I'll lie on my deathbed wishing I'd billed more hours at the office.

Chesapeake City, Maryland

2009-04-19T12:40:00.003-04:00

Under the powerful influence of spring fever, Eve and I drove through the sunshine down the Eastern Shore of Maryland to Chesapeake City. There we sat on the porch of the Bayard House restaurant and watched a parade of yachts making their way against the tide on the Cheapeake & Delaware Canal westward to the Bay. We realized it had been something like six years since we'd visited that charming, historic town, and we resolved that (at least as long as gas prices remain within the realm of reason), to make that and many other excursions in the warm months to come. Getting out of town is good for the soul. Thought for the day, from a sign hanging behind the Hole in the Wall Bar at the Bayard House: "We acknowledge the evils of alcohol, and here highly resolve to get rid of the wine cellar, one glass at a time." Amen.

At Sea, 1968 (II)

2009-04-17T09:10:00.005-04:00

Here are a few more shots from the 1968 deployment of USS Suffolk County. From the top, meet Ensign Willie Maljan, Yeoman Second Class John DeRosa, and Seaman James Cosby.

BRAVO ZULU, NAVY SEALs!!

2009-04-13T16:17:00.002-04:00

I must have known something dramatic of a naval description was about to happen when I posted yesterday's blurb here. When I was on active duty, I got friendly with a number of Navy SEAL team members and Underwater Demolition Team frogpersons. Truly awesome physical specimens, every one, they could party all night and then in the morning run eight miles up the beach and eight miles back, then eat a four-egg omelet and down a quart of milk. Yesterday's feat of derring-do by a team of SEALs in taking on and whacking those pathetic Somali "pirates" made me proud to think I once wore a Naval uniform -- even if I was just a ship driver.

At Sea, 1968

2009-04-11T09:26:00.005-04:00

Several months ago, I was rummaging through a box of old photos from my active Navy days, and I found some shots I took during a fleet gunnery exercise off the Atlantic seaboard, of which the above are a sampling. The ship was USS Suffolk County (LST-1173). I was a lieutenant (jg) serving as main propulsion assistant. The year was 1968, Exercise "Exotic Dancer." The chaps in the pictures are (from the top): Sanders, Gunner's Mate First Class; Cantu, Seaman, and Bullock, Seaman. I wonder where these guys are now.

Dereliction of Blog Duty

2009-04-09T08:00:00.003-04:00

A couple of folks -- loyal readers of this blog, it seems -- have chided me gently about the infrequency of my postings of late. I plead guilty to the charge. In this season between winter and spring, my life just seems rather devoid of things to write about. I seem to be awash in the warm quotidian bath of which I spoke back on New Year's Day. Thanks for your loyalty, friends. Things are bound to change. They always do.

The Adventures of Jim and Jill

2009-03-15T17:11:00.005-04:00

My friends Jim and Jill are a couple who have mastered the art of easy living; not everyone would drive from Reading, PA to New York just to get a doughnut, or to Somers Point, NJ just to get some seafood, or to Ocean City, MD just to get "a crab." Or to Boston just to hear a Celtic fusion band called Dropkick Murphys. On top of all that, Jim is the ace of kitchen quarterbacks. As he puts it, he does all the work of preparing the food until the guests arrive; then he pours a drink, sits down and barks out orders to everyone else in the room to get the food on the table. Truth to tell, Jill is actually the one who keeps things organized, but she has the vital spousal knack of letting the old man think he's the brains behind the operation.Yesterday it was corned beef, colcannon, cabbage, potatoes, a pasta dish and a full bottle of John Jameson's Irish whisky. Happy Saint Paddy's Day to all, and thanks to Jim and Jill for a dining adventure!

Brief Followup

2009-03-12T12:36:00.002-04:00

The "Author for a Cause" event at GoggleWorks (see previous post) has been declared the best book-signing event EVER at that venue. We were all certainly pleased at the success of the event, and now we're working on ideas to make the next one even better. I'll post some pictures on here whenever I get around to developing them.

AUTHORS FOR A CAUSE

2009-02-18T08:46:00.001-05:00

AUTHORS FOR A CAUSE

On Sunday, March 8, 2009, I’ll be joining fellow authors T.K. Marion, Mickey Getty, Sue Lange and Carol Haile at the GoggleWorks in Reading for an all-day book-signing event – proceeds to be donated to the GoggleWorks (that’s the “Cause”, you see). With Saint Patrick’s Day less than a week away, the theme will be vaguely Irish, with a certain amount of Irish-style shenanigans to accompany the literary stuff. If you’re within range of 201 Washington Street, Reading, any time between 11:00 A.M. and 4:30 P.M. on the 8th, stop by. If you buy a book, you’ll not only be supporting one of Reading’s cultural treasures, but also you’ll qualify for a raffle prize. For more information, see www.goggleworks.org .

MIDWINTER DREAMS

2009-02-03T17:29:00.002-05:00

MIDWINTER DREAMS

If indeed a picture is worth a thousand words, this one speaks eloquently. I gazed at it for a long time the other day, after my still-running car automatically locked itself while I was chipping ice off the windshield. Pictured are the Curmudgeon’s Son, his long-suffering wife Eve, and good friends Dennis and Penny Murphy, on a sunny day in Sea Isle City, New Jersey.

My Retirement Dinner

2009-01-18T12:22:00.003-05:00

Now that my retirement nest egg has gone completely rotten, thanks to those Wall Street Masters of the Universe and greedy CEOs, I've had to throttle back my plans for a lavish, festive retirement dinner. Here's a photo from our local paper's society section, taken at a downtown welfare soup kitchen. Now I've taken up residence in a stove crate under a nearby railroad bridge. Always dreamed of retiring to a place near the water.

A New Year's Greeting

2009-01-01T10:59:00.002-05:00

THE CURMUDGEON’S SON SITS IN THE SUNSHINE ON NEW YEAR’S DAY AND GRIPES ABOUT THE HUMAN CONDITION (REPRISE)

At this time of resolutions and good intentions to reinvent our lives, it’s interesting to ponder why this impulse tends to strike only once a year. It’s like opening the windows on the first balmy, breezy day in the spring. The Solstice is past. The days begin to lengthen, however imperceptibly. The urge to shake off the shackles of the past peeks out like the sun from behind a dark cloud. Freedom! Why are we so afraid of it? Why do others get so anxious and disapproving when we talk about it – or, God forbid, actually practice it? In every social environment I’ve ever experienced, it’s been the same: whether they’ll admit it or not, people don’t want other people to start acting too free. I think it’s why New Year’s Day is a holiday for so many of us. It’s how society lets us get this “I’m free” nonsense out of our systems for a day, before we slip back into the warm quotidian bath of quiet desperation in which we’ll soak for the next 364 days – unless death or insanity grabs us first. That’s more than just a little bit gloomy, isn’t it? You’ll have to decide for yourself whether you find a kernel of truth in it. This New Year’s Day of 2009, my take on it is that freedom is for the very young, the very old and the very crazy. So have a crazy new year! I intend to. Unless I slip and fall back into that warm quotidian bath... Clem.

To You All at Christmas

2008-12-24T15:26:00.001-05:00

THE GLOUCESTERSHIRE WASSAIL Wassail! Wassail! All over the town, Our toast it is white and our ale it is brown, Our bowl it is made from the white maple tree, With the wassailing bowl, we’ll drink to thee. And here’s to our horse, and to his right ear, God send our master a happy new year: As happy new year as e’er he did see, With my wassailing bowl, we’ll drink to thee. So here is to Cherry and to his right cheek, Pray God send our master a good piece of beef: And a good piece of beef that we all may see; With the wassailing bowl, we’ll drink to thee. And here is to Dobbin and to his right eye, Pray God send our master a good Christmas pie, And a good Christmas pie that we all may see; With the wassailing bowl we’ll drink to thee. So here’s to Broad Mary and to her broad horn, may God send our master a good crop of corn And a good crop of corn that we all may see, With the wassailing bowl, we’ll drink to thee. And here is to Fillpail and to her left ear, Pray God send our master a happy New Year. And a happy New Year as e'er he did see, With the wassailing bowl, we'll drink to thee. And here is to Colly and to her long tail; Pray God send our master he never may fail. A bowl of strong beer! I pray you draw near, And our jolly wassail it's then you shall hear. Come , butler, come fill us a bowl of the best; Then we hope that your soul in heaven may rest; But if you do draw us a bowl of the small, Then down shall go butler, bowl and all. Then here's to the maid in the lily white smock, Who tripped to the door and slipped back the lock. Who tripped to the door and pulled back the pin, For to let these jolly wassailers in. ---Traditional English

Lancaster (PA) Craft Show 2008

2008-10-19T08:48:00.003-04:00

Over Labor Day weekend, we visited the Long's Park Craft Fair in Lancaster, PA on a beautiful late-summer afternoon. Some of the exhibits were so clever and whimsical I couldn't resist photographing them. I felt like something of a freeloader in doing so, but our house has too much stuff in it already and could not hold any more (even if we could afford it). So, where there were no conspicuously-posted signs forbidding it, I snapped away and here are a few of the results.

My Beloved Anthracite Coal Region II

2008-09-27T16:04:00.002-04:00

Here's another shot of the Reading Coal & Iron Company's Saint Nicholas Coal Breaker in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania. This may well become a bit of history because, as you see, the destruction is already well under way.

My Beloved Anthracite Coal Region

2008-09-13T12:01:00.007-04:00

Here are some views from the Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania Southern Anthracite Coal Field (as it looks today), which formed the setting for my novel series Up Home. This is the Old Saint Nicholas coal breaker, between Shenandoah and Mahanoy City. Compare it to Windstorm's wonderful cover art for Book One of my novel (look to your right). Here's another shot of Old Saint Nick: The Saint Nick was built in the 1930s by the Philadelphia & Reading Coal & Iron Company as a regional breaker, to process coal from a number of mines in the area. It's long-since out of operation, and may disappear before too much more time passes. So, you may be looking at a bit of history here. The Russians were only one of the numerous eastern European nationalities to immigrate to the Pennsylvania anthracite fields. They've left their imprint in the form of beautiful Russian Orthodox churches, such as the Church of the Ascension in Frackville: The old coal towns were famous for having a taproom on every corner that wasn't occupied by a church. Here's a typical street scene from Frackville:

Farewell, Sweetheart

2008-09-13T11:52:00.002-04:00

I gave up my sweet little stand of Highland parlor pipes for adoption today. She's going to live in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, with a chap named Joe Jordan. I wish her many hours of lively music, now that I've released her from mothballed captivity in an old Samsonite briefcase in the back of my now-incrementally-less-cluttered closet.