The Solstice is Past

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!