Laboring Americans must relearn how to roll cars. Continue reading Laboring
Tag Archives: father
Keeping True
On Father’s Day 2019, I performed an act my own late father might’ve considered sacrilegious. I attended a Dodgers game in Chavez Ravine.
To mitigate my baseball transgression I cheered for the visitors not the home nine.
Father was a Brooklyn Dodgers man through and through. The Los Angeles Dodgers could never have engaged his rooting interest. Continue reading Keeping True
The Mohicans
Vernon is dying. He is a cousin who inquired about Edna Long three years ago. She was an unknown figure who appeared in one of our family branch’s turn-of-the-century census tracts. Turn of the 20th century.
The people who may’ve known about her, remembered her, they’ve been all good and dead way before curiosity aroused his present-day fascination with this stranger who’ll remain a mystery. Continue reading The Mohicans
Old Paint Was a Lemon
Old Paint was wheezing harder than usual. After all the part swapping, repairs, and just general babying of that car, what finally forced my hand was a check engine light. Sure. It could’ve been a fouled sensor. Or maybe it might’ve been the first sign of the head gasket preparing to crack.
In any case, I read the yellow dashboard light as a clear warning from the gearhead gods. It became the straw which broke my camel’s back. Continue reading Old Paint Was a Lemon
Decoration Day
We Americans need to remove Memorial Day from our Monday holiday schedule. Instead, like Independence Day, observe this occasion on the date whence it falls. Unless it occurs on a Saturday or Sunday. Only then we should accede and extend the holiday onto Monday.
We should resume Memorial Day’s normal cycle in order to give more than lip service to patriotism and sacrifice. Americans have been giving both shorter shrift since the Reagan Administration. Currently, President Scalawag has all but erased their meaning.
The America in which we presently reside has become at its now feebly beating heart one the Founders would not recognize. Not from the technological or social advances none of them could’ve conceived. The tricorns, breeches and buckles set would see that little of the premise which created our once great nation still exists.
Rather, Americans have been gradually becoming disinclined in practicing the attributes that incited the Colonials to become Americans. Continue reading Decoration Day
Ghost Warranty
A stalled car starts this 2018.
My wheels must’ve been equipped with artificial intelligence of the devious kind. An ’02 Mercury that has under 64,000 miles on its odometer, my car’s prime directive is planned obsolescence. Continue reading Ghost Warranty
Christmas Prisms
One aspect of our society we should hope never succumbs to speed, convenience or economy is the habit of exchanging Christmas cards. The real paper ones sealed inside envelopes, bearing stamps, and dropped in mailboxes.
Unlike the rotary phone, black & white televisions, and phonographs, inventions that became consumer goods which progress raced by and rendered obsolete, printed cards delivered via surface mail, bearing stamps, contained in covers carrying the sometimes nearly indecipherable scrawls of well-meaning senders who held the recipients in worthy esteem, are worthwhile remnants of our less instantaneous time.
They reflected humanity. Ours. Continue reading Christmas Prisms
Meet the Strangers
Certainly we’ll all notice Islam has frightened a good portion of Anglo-America. Until the attacks most of those now afraid couldn’t have named a Muslim outside of Muhammad Ali. Today the quivering and trembling can list chapter and verse every depredation Islam has prepared for the Christian West.
Especially the ones which only exist in the most fevered imaginations.
By the way, after the attacks one of the reasons presented for the date chosen was an in your face gesture to the nation’s emergency service responses. Who does 911 call on 9/11?
Islamists are nowhere near as witty. Instead, the date commemorates an important battle between Christianity and Islam. A conflagration more vital than the Crusades and the Reconquista combined. One persevered faith. The other was thwarted for all time. Continue reading Meet the Strangers
Good Ether
Hear music as ether. Good ether.
With zero apologies to Marcel Proust, music not madeleines better allow ourselves to re-immerse ourselves in the past and fully revivify it. Not so much live music at that as tunes sound engineers have massaged down to their last notes. To me, too much concert music sounds ragged. Live performances allow bands license to mess with the perfection which either narcotized or motivated me in the first place.
I generally prefer my ether unadulterated and exactly the way I’ve come to favor it. Continue reading Good Ether
Who Was Oisk?
A vintage sportswear retailer issued a baseball catalogue a short time ago. Its cover featured a forlorn boy amid the ruins of what had been the quirky splendor of Ebbets Field, one-time home of the Brooklyn Dodgers. They had abandoned the ballpark and borough for Los Angeles. Their old address was being razed for low-income housing.
The dejected boy toted a bat and glove. By his demeanor both destruction and departure confused him. Doubtlessly he had been a true-blue Dodgers fan.
Can’t imagine such devotion today. Sports franchises routinely extort municipalities for taxpayer funded improvements and fresh facilities. Free agency has broken once solid binds between players and fans.
Even our old baseball cathedrals are no longer sacrosanct.
There should’ve been an outcry and defense for old Yankee Stadium similar to that which spared Grand Central Terminal sharing the fate of McKim and White’s Penn Station. Instead, wrecking balls demolished the House That Ruth Built. And while the team simply moved across 161st Street, the old edifice’s aura remained put. Monumental as the new structure is, the Yankees’ glorious continuity is broken.
Ghosts do not travel. Not even in the Bronx. Continue reading Who Was Oisk?