If You Ask Me

 It is a rare occasion nowadays when I'm asked for my opinion, but thoughts  still simmer to a boil in my mind. 

   At present, there is a Public Service Announcement from the New York State Department of Health flooding the television channels  which I find to be disturbing, depressing and essentially useless. There are several  scenes  portraying an individual,  shifting from his healthy childhood to what is apparently his deathbed. Since the message is aimed at discouraging smoking, I assume the man is dying of lung cancer or other tobacco related causes. The images are extremely realistic, invoking heartbreaking recall of actual loss  to those watching.

Who is watching? What is the target audience?  I would surmise, since the message is anti-tobacco, that the PSA is aimed at discourgaging young people from using it.  Apart from the recent statistics that show fewer youths are smoking now than in the past, it is also true that fewer youths watch network television, home to these films. How many teens would take a message away from an ad which they would almost certainly deem irrelevant. The story of a healthy baby and toddler morphing into a sickly older adult is unlikely to register with them. 

  So the audience for this somber and morose message from the Health Department is destined to be older adults, those who still watch network tv. Speaking for at least one of them, I say we don't need any more grisly reminders of impending death. I despise those ads.

In sum

 Too difficult  to consolidate here, but I tried to answer the question in a dream:  Ben asked if I'd ever heard of a band called Faulty.   I wanted  to say the only rhyme would be "salty," but try as I might, I couldn't get myself back in the dream. Probably just as well...

Frozen Time

The holidays are over. The household is bereft

Of the noises and the voices; only echoes have been left.

Their car drove off, with kids and dog, 

And I resigned myself

To adding one more visit

To those stored on memory's shelf. 

But hope survived with the dawn of the day.

A network of footprints was etched to display

A gift frozen in time, a vision sent, 

A precious reminder of what visiting meant:

Deep footprints where the parents strode, 

Steps straight and aligned in approach to the road.

Circled around theirs, in loops to and fro,

Small running steps, forging trails in the snow.

Now only the snow recalls the  sound

Of closed doors, goodby hugs, and frozen ground.

The house stands still. The silence grows, 

Erasing with time all that memory froze.

 

The Big Snow

 Way back around 1966 or so (I could look the date up, but not now) , I was teaching at St. Thomas School in Delmar, and driving a 1957 Chevy, which was temperamental at best.I don't recall any warnings of impending  heavy snowfall, and certainly no early dismissals, but when I left the school around 3:30 p.m. or so, the snow had already accumulated and was still falling, heavily. It took me almost 2 hours to get out of Delmar. Traffic was backed up all the way, and my car stalled at least twice, during which times I would get out, raise the hood, do something with the carburetor and the car would start. But on this day, now turned to darkness, by the time I got to Northern Boulevard  to get to Menands, my car came to a dead stop right at the intersection leading to the bridge. So I was blocking traffic, and everybody was anxious to get home. I had retreated to my car, when a very large and very angry black man appeared at my window, demanding I move my car. I said it was dead, so he said all I will do is move your car out of the way, and he pushed my car with his and drove off. I still didn't know what to do. I thought of going to one of the houses across the street , but the snowbanks were now so steep I couldn't get through to the house.  I knew there was a hotel/motel at the end of the bridge; I know the name, but it escapes me now.  I am wearing only a fairly light ski jacket and the snow is blinding, but I start out walking on the bridge to the hotel. I am cold and can barely see ahead.  I am part way across the bridge when a car stops, a man yells out to me to get in. He seems angry too. I do as I'm told and I get in his car. He drops me off at the motel and drives away. I go in and ask for a room. I am very cold and of course would normally have been hungry, but all I want is to get in bed and go to sleep, only calling my mother before I do so.

  The next morning I know I have to somehow get my car started; it's quite a ways down the road, and I go to the front desk to pay my bill. The desk clerk there remarks that he thought I might have frozen from  the way I'd looked the night before. He also tells me  that Father Bondi, parish priest at St. Thomas, had paid my bill, and had also arranged for my car to have been started and driven to the motel. It seems Father Bondi, whom I had very little contact with, had called my mother to see if I'd made it home in the snowstorm. At the time, St. Thomas, Grades k-8,  had only 2 lay teachers employed there. The others were all of the religious order and lived in the convent nearby. He must have felt responsible for all his teachers, even the temporary ones. I can only hope I thanked him for his concern.

I sometimes feel there is too much hype about the present forecast, but I can appreciate the reasoning .

Cookies

The competition was fierce, but I prevailed:  The Nobel Prize of Cookiedom

When You Really Need Someone...

 I finally fell asleep, only to be awakened by a persistent itch just to the left on my upper back. That' s a hard spot to reach even with 2 functioning shoulders, and I have neither. The left shoulder was damaged years ago when a gust of wind blew against the door of a medical building I was leaving, and  the right shoulder suffered a complete rotary cuff tear a few years ago as I attenpted to heave myself from ground to top of my front steps. They do not recommend surgical repair for people past a certain age. 

  It's very early in the morning and I try to stay in bed to reach the itchy spot, but an unable to. I used to have an old wooden backscratcher, but it disppeared under the bed one day, and I can't reach that either. I sometimes wear my pajama tops inside out if they have a sewn-in label which may cause an itch, but that's no help here. So I have to get out of bed, get in  a standing position, and use my left arm to push my right arm as close as possible to the itchy area. And you think Greenland has problems.

In Memory

 

I came across this award, for 15 years of service, dated 1958. So he would have started working for Behr- Manning in  1943, about the time we moved to Valley Falls. 

Like many men of that time, he had little interaction with his children's daily lives. Workday started when he left the house at 6:30 A.M., and he returned about 12 hours later.

 I have 2 vivid memories. He taught me how to play checkers when I was about 10 years old. When I was 19, my dog Lassie died. It was the norm for him to bury our deceased animals in the back yard. But he told me he didn't want to bury Lassie in the bare dirt, so he built what he called a "rough box" and laid her in that before burying her in a section of my mother's flower garden, close to our house.