CALL ME RIP VAN WINKLE

It's been so long since I posted anything on this blog I wouldn't blame all my loyal followers (both of them) for having wandered off into much greener cyber-pastures.

Over the past year, I got mildly addicted to an interactive storytelling site called "Cowbird," which seemed to start out as a thoroughly joyful and enjoyable forum for swapping stories about just about whatever came to mind, with non-judgmental feedback in the form of "Love" notices and, more recently, "Retells," which seem to be where the trouble crept in.

Cowbird has become almost nauseatingly saccharine — lots of weepy politically-correct claptrap about love, peace, meditation, Obama worship, limp-wristed liberalism, dying loved ones, alcohol and drug recovery programs, self-aggrandizement, and lots and lots of finger-wagging from people who seem, in typical Big Brother fashion, to know what's best for everybody.

In the beginning there were a number of interesting, quirky, outspoken writers who contributed material to Cowbird.  Some of the more robust have changed their electro-identities, and continue to drop interesting little bombs into the midst of all the handwringing and whining about — well, let's see —

The wonderfulness of being a federal pencil pusher who fancies himself a Natural Leader, who is also a Gifted Storyteller and can go on ad nauseam about the wonderfulness of his adventures as a drug-bum deserter who went AWOL from active service in the Navy and somehow avoided getting his ass court-martialed;

Endless droning about the Bible — most recently a tedious exegesis on the Book of Job, together with a lot of other self-righteous claptrap, all accompanied by annoying, loud music (yes, you can put music on Cowbird);

Lots and lots and lots of meaningless "poetry."

Well, dear Reader, you can see that your old friend, the Curmudgeon is alive, kicking, bitching, griping, and loaded for bear.

Roger, out…

In Praise of Good Food

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 my 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?

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

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

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

The Morning After the Night Before...

'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!

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

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

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

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

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!!

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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...