We hope everyone has a wonderful 2016, one that’s even better than you hope for, filled with friends, family, cats, dogs, turtles, blue jays, round rocks, octopuses, great books, delicious braised short ribs, noninvasive plants, and clouds full of arcs and haloes.
Category Archives: Personal
Shadows of things that have been
Every good feeling I have about Christmas today is a remnant of the excitement and joy I felt as a child at Christmas.
When we were kids, there always seemed to be a huge pile of presents around the tree for my brother and me. It was hard to wait till Christmas to open them. Putting all those presents around the tree and making us wait to open them was like putting a bowl of food in front of a dog and not letting him eat. When I was old enough to go to school, my mother took a job in the office of a textile mill in Rome. We always called her when we got home from school. When Christmas was near, we called and begged her to let us open just one present early. It must have been pretty annoying, because sometimes she gave in.
This is one of my earliest Christmases. It must have been around 1952. I would have been two years old and my brother would have been five.
I’m holding a toy truck, possibly a garbage truck, and my brother is torn between the train set and the Motorcade service station and car wash. I remember the metal Motorcade, with the elevator to take the cars up to parking on the roof and the ramp that let them scoot back down to the floor. It looks like we also got a ten-pin bowling set and a toy telephone. My brother got a cap pistol. The picture was taken in our living room, and what you can see here is the entire room.
This was a different Christmas. We got Lincoln Logs.
The bike is my brother’s first. It was green.
Here is my father and my brother Henry at yet another Christmas. This might have been before I was born. The sofa and chair are the same but without slip covers.
Here’s Leah with her familys’ tree.
When I look back at my family Christmases, I have no idea how my parents managed. In those days, my mother kept a budget down to the penny. Here are two pages from her spending record from 1949, before I was born. My parents and Henry lived in Akron, Ohio, at that time.
Some of the expenses look amazingly small today. Car insurance was $4.00. The house payment was $14.00. The electric bill was $1.75, and the gas bill was $3.00. My mother had bought a sewing machine and was making payments on it. But look at groceries – $26.00. Sounds low until you realize that was for two weeks at a time that my father was making under $200 a month.
By the time I was born in May 1950, my family had moved back to Rome and bought a house on Redmond Road. It was one of around two dozen identical duplexes that had been built as temporary housing for staff at Battey General Hospital, which opened at the end of Redmond Road in 1943 as a hospital for sick, wounded and disabled servicemen. Each unit of the duplex had a living room, eat-in kitchen, two bedrooms and a bathroom. My parents rented the other side of our duplex to a divorced woman and her child. More than a half a century later, that woman would share a room with my mother in a nursing home on Redmond Circle, an extension of Redmond Road.
Here is a page from my mother’s spending record from July, 1950.
The house payment was now $66.36. Groceries were $30.00. Henry got a pair of shoes for $2.00. It looks like my father was paying off insulation he bought for the house. My father worked at the Post Office then. It looks like his semi-monthly salary was $113.00, which they supplemented with $42.00 in rent for the other side of the duplex. At the end of the two-week period, they had managed to save a little over $14.00.
So, I don’t really know how they managed Christmas for us two kids, but I know why they did.
My mother continued to decorate her house and a tree in her living room, right up to the time she died.
She loved Christmas, and I imagine that part of that was because of her own memories of Christmas when we were young.
When my mother and Leah’s parents were alive, we decorated for Christmas.
Leah is decorating the tree. My last doberman, Zeus, is trying to snooze on his living room bed. The late, great Zoe is peeking out the sliding glass door. Looking for Santa, I suppose.
My parents are gone now, and so are Leah’s. We have no children and no close family here. We don’t decorate or celebrate Christmas. We’ll probably eat some turkey sliced for us at the Walmart deli, and maybe we’ll fix some packaged dressing. But really, all that’s left of the holiday for us is the ghost of Christmas past.
Lighter than air memories
When Leah and I went to Little River Falls on Wednesday (Dec 2), I saw something in the distance that I thought was a hot air balloon. It turned out to be a blimp.
So, not the Goodyear blimp.
As it happens I actually sat in the pilot’s seat of the Goodyear blimp during a flight over Augusta, Ga, back in 1978. Being a newspaper reporter didn’t pay much, especially in Augusta, but it did have its perks. When the blimp landed at the Augusta airport, they let some local reporters go for a ride. Each of us got a chance to sit in the pilot’s seat and twirl the large wheel that controlled its vertical direction. The wheel was at my right hand, next to the seat, spin it forward to make the nose go down, and backward to make the nose go up.
This is what I got after the flight.
I’m a card-carrying charter member of the Goodyear Blimp Club.
A few days after the blimp left, we got a call in the newsroom that the blimp had crashed at the airport. It turned out that it didn’t crash, it just tore free from its mooring. There is a special line that unzips the blimp’s envelop and deflates the balloon if it comes free from its mooring. That’s what happened, apparently during a thunderstorm. I couldn’t find the article I wrote for the newspaper, but I found the Associated Press story we sent in another newspaper.
Way, way back in the very old days, my family used to go to Akron, Ohio, to visit my mother’s family. Once so long ago that the memory is dim, we drove by the huge blimp hangar at the Goodyear plant, located at Wingfoot Lake outside Akron. During the war (that’s World War II), my grandmother worked at “the Goodyear” as they called it.
Goodyear doesn’t build blimps any more. The current Goodyear blimp is not, in fact, an actual blimp. A blimp has a completely fabric envelope. The only solid parts are the gondola and its engines. When the blimp unzipped itself in Augusta, what you saw was the gondola and a large area that looked like someone had put drop cloths down for a huge painting job.
Today’s “blimp” is actually a semirigid airship, probably more accurately known as a Zeppelin, especially since it is what Goodyear calls a hybrid of a Zeppelin airship with Goodyear modifications. It was constructed at the Wingfoot Lake hangar.
Leah named one of the stray dogs that have passed through here Zeppelin, since we were on an initial-Z naming spree.
You can find more information about Goodyear’s blimp operations at their website.
The Directv blimp is, apparently, a true blimp.
Another perk I got as a newspaper reporter was a ride in a machine that is almost the polar opposite of an airship. I’ll post about that later.
Happy Thanksgiving
We hope everyone who reads this blog, and even those who don’t, has a good Thanksgiving.
Leah and I are pretty much alone here in Rome. Neither of us has much family left, and those who are left don’t live around here. So we’ll probably end up having the Thanksgiving buffet at Ryan’s, otherwise known as a steak place.
If Thanksgiving is here, you know Christmas is sneaking up, too. Our Christmas cactus is starting to bloom.
Here’s a closer shot.
It seems pretty happy there, sitting by the sliding glass door in the living room. We’re happy that it’s happy.
This is one reason we’re moving
We have been working on routine maintenance finishing our downstairs for some time now. I finally got around to painting the roof overhang. “Got around to” is not really right. Faced up to is more accurate. Some of it is not hard to reach, but some of it is. This is where I was on Saturday afternoon.
When I built the house, I wanted the farmhouse look, so instead of soffits, I kept the rafter tails exposed. I still like the look, but I would never do it again. It was more work to finish than soffits, and now it’s more work to repaint. I painted two rafter bays at a time and then had to move the ladder. When I got to the last pair of rafters, I painted some and then saw some debris inside the vent. The attic vents are just holes drilled into a two-by-six that spans the rafters. I stapled screening to keep insects out of the holes, but spiders and other things sometimes get in. I assumed what I saw was old spider webs, so I stuck my finger in and dragged some out.
That’s when I saw the wasp I had almost touched.
I climbed down the ladder with all due haste and gave up on painting that part of the roof overhang for the day. I planned to paint it later at night, when the wasps would be dormant. Unfortunately, I found them at still active, possibly because of the floodlights right outside their nest. So I climbed up with some wasp spray and gave the vent hole a good dousing. Wasps kept coming out, so, once again I retreated.
I found another wasp nest just under the outside of the handrail on the front walk. At the time I was propping a ladder on the edge of the walk, on the outside of the railing, and painting the garage overhang. I saw that nest just as I was preparing to move the ladder right next to the nest. That meant another delay in painting. Later Saturday night I sprayed that nest. It was easily accessible, so I eliminated it.
I did not, however, eliminate the nest in the attic vent. This is what that looked like Sunday afternoon.
You can see how far I got with the painting, and you can also see two wasps, one at each rafter vent. You can also see something else that is going to force me to climb up again — I knocked one of the floodlights out of alignment. That means another climb up. I’m going to be as stealthy as I can. I’ll adjust the light and then give the vent hole another good spray. I haven’t been stung so far. Maybe my luck will hold.
I think I’ll wait to paint that part of the overhang until cooler weather.