Happy July 4

Happy July 4. Happy Birthday, America.
Although to be completely historically correct, the whole Declaration of Independence was not signed on the 4th, it’s as good a day as any to celebrate what those men of vision, bravery, foresight and yes, a little treason, did 233 years ago.
I cannot tell a lie (yeah, me and George Washington), a good deal of my historical perspective of this day comes from the musical 1776. It’s as good a telling of the Continental Congress and the history of our independence as any, with some speculation and fiction thrown in to make it a good musical. It is, in fact, a great musical and it’s hard to watch without getting goosebumps. It’s a good representation of those times and those people, not just the men, but their women as well, personified as Martha Jefferson and Abigail Adams. Martha, Thomas Jefferson’s wife, is brought to Philadelphia to appease Jefferson, after he tells John Adams and Benjamin Franklin that he needs what we might call some ‘R & R’ with his wife – “But I burn, Mr. A.”, he says. “So do I, Mr. J’”, Adams responds, which brings Franklin’s response “You, John?” Franklin is portrayed as the somewhat lusty codger he was, while Adams is more shown to give all his passion to the cause. (This is belied in the songs between he and Abigail, where he asks ‘is my favorite lover’s pillow still firm and fair’ – yes, folks, they were real people with real loves and desires.) But, both Franklin and Adams realize they need to fulfill Jefferson’s need to fulfill theirs and get the declaration written, and so they send for Martha. When questioned as to how Jefferson is so lucky as to have a beautiful young wife such as her (and never mind all the things that he also found aside from her), she replies with the song ‘He Plays The Violin’ – what better reason to fall in love with a man than that he will play the violin for you.
Abigail Adams seems more practical, but then again, she’s a New Englander and they tend to be. She and John have needs for their causes and sing a lively debate over whose is more: he demands that she set all the ladies to looking for saltpeter – not for what they might think but for gunpowder, while she has a more practical request – that he find them pins for their sewing – they sign off one of their series of letters in song with the words that say so much more: “Saltpeter, John” “Pins, Abigail”.
These were the people who forged and formed our country. Thank goodness there are enough of them still around to keep it going.
July 4th memories: picnics with the family, bringing in hay, riding the horse in parades, running around the lawn with sparklers. And once, at my grandparent’s in Tuckahoe, so I couldn’t have been more than 6 or 7 maybe, there was a community picnic I think, in the courtyard of their apartment complex, and all the kids got together and spelled out ‘Happy 4th of July’ with sparklers and then tried to light them fast enough to have it all sparking at once. I think we made it.
Today the closest I get to a holiday is – hm, well, I guess I don’t. I have heard that red, white and blue dessert is planned for supper – no picnic because we couldn’t figure out how to do it around the Saturday Elks supplied supper. And it will be Patriotic Night again in coffee house and that always makes me a little snuffly. I listen to the company sing songs from ‘You’re A Grand Old Flag’ to ‘God Bless The USA’ to ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ and I think look at those proud young people – there’s hope for us.
Enjoy your 4th, and have a safe one.

Tragic truck accidents

Two multiple fatal accidents within two days, and all the reporting and comment emphasizes that they were caused by big trucks. As a former big truck driver who has come close to this same situation (come to think of it, I was actually involved in one that fortunately was no where near that devastating but that’s another story), and who has also had a friend killed by an identical one, I’d like to shift some of the blame.
Both the recent wrecks, and the one closer to me, took place when traffic was stopped for previous incidents. If you’ve ever been surprised by a vehicle stopped in front of you when driving your car (or fire truck, ambulance, pick-up, SUV, whatever) you know the drill: “Ohmigawd, that car’s stopped! I gotta take my foot off the gas and put it on the brake - I gotta pull to the left/right to avoid it. I gotta hope my car stops in time!” Most of the time you can avoid a crash. You’re probably usually driving a vehicle that weighs a couple of tons, and even at 60 or more mph, you can stop it fairly soon.
A big truck, fully loaded, can legally weigh up to 80,000 pounds - 40 tons. And even with ‘those great big brakes’ that weight and inertia take at least the length of a football field to stop. Probably more, given the speed limit on the roads where these happened (I-65 in Indiana, Will Rogers Tpk in Oklahoma)is I think 70 mph. Simple physics, folks.
Law enforcement should know this, maybe some of them do. So why, whyinhell, don’t they put a warning car or lights, signs, whatever, at a point before the stopped traffic and yes, keep moving it as the stationary vehicles build up, to warn oncoming traffic? Safety of those working at the scene is a top priority, why isn’t safety of those held hostage by the scene?
How many of us have been on a scene and observed multiple law enforcement personnel standing around playing pocket pool, doing nothing to protect anybody? Surely there’s a better deployment of that resource to perhaps save a life - or five, or nine?
When discussing the incident where my friend was killed (where there was no wreck, traffic was stopped by the troopers because there was a person threatening to jump off a high bridge) with a trooper, I asked why they couldn’t have kept one of the three lanes on the bridge open to let traffic through, she (yes I said she) replied (in the ‘I’m the trooper therefore I know’ tone that we’ve all experienced hearing) ‘Do you know how many accidents that could cause!” Another person in the conversation answered ‘Seems to me what you did, did cause one.’ Hmm-she had no answer to that.
So I want to shift some of the blame to all those people who don’t do anything to protect the innocent bystanders - the stopped traffic. Let people know there’s traffic stopped ahead - can’t be that hard to figure out how. Is it an idea that might save lives? I think so. Is it ever gonna happen? I doubt it. Sigh.
Sympathy to all those involved in those horrific wrecks: the victims and their close ones, the truck drivers who now have to live with what happened under their wheels, and the responders who have to deal with it, hope they have good support teams.

Celebrity deaths

Ed McMahon died. Farrah Faucett died. Michael Jackson died. All within the past week.
Ed McMahon – to be expected, given his age, and the fact that he had bone cancer.
Farrah Faucett – to be expected, given the fact that she had cancer.
Michael Jackson – to be expected, if indeed it is given the fact, as a news report I am listening to as I write is saying, that he was taking a mixture of prescription (possibly diet and/or painkillers plus who knows what else) and possibly non-prescription drugs.
And who is getting the most press? You gotta know if you’ve been looking and listening for the past few days. Yep, Michael Jackson.
Why, news media, why?
Because he made more headlines in life, and because there is the potential for scandal, and scandal sells newspapers, as the old saying goes.
Yep, if it can be proved that he was taking dangerous drugs that could have caused his cardiac arrest (and they can do it, anyone in EMS has seen this first hand), there’s who knows how many more days of stories that the general public will snap right up.
Never mind the fact that if the others were getting the same press, with the same attention focused on what caused their deaths, it might encourage people to donate to cancer research or to hospices, or encourage more work towards cancer relief.
Never mind that they may have led lives without the questions that Jackson’s raised (the whole pedophile thing, for example, plus the questions about his lightening his skin, altering his nose and so on) and therefore might be more worthy of our attention and adulation.
Never mind that the others were equal talents in their own right.
Michael Jackson is getting the headlines – today’s are that they are moving his body to a mortuary. Well, duh, what else do they do with bodies?
And the world can’t keep turning unless we keep hearing all about it. Yesterday I heard yet another of the ongoing news reports, where the announcer said “….changed the world……”. To which I said “WHAT!? Really!?” and stared at the radio longer than I should have, given I was driving at the time. Michael Jackson changed the world? Puh-leeze, folks – grabbing headlines by questionable behavior doesn’t make you a world-changer, it makes you a headline-grabber. Please save that designation for those who really do something worthwhile to make a difference.
Sigh.
Please remember the others who died this week, and maybe make a donation to the Cancer Society or a local hospice group – they need your help more than Michael Jackson needs more headlines.

Father's Day

If your father is still with you, see him, call him, talk to him. If not, take a few minutes to remember him.
My father has much to do with who and how I am, I think. For one thing, the ADD that my grandson was diagnosed with, I can trace back through my daughter, myself , and on to my father. He was an intelligent man who only went to the eighth grade in formal schooling, but who never stopped learning. He was a young man during Word War II, but never was in the armed forces, I think he was deferred for flat feet, if I recall correctly. He started working for a company called Pulver Gas & Oil, delivering fuel oil. When the company began to offer oil burner installation and service, he drove to Rochester, NY (a major trip in those pre-NYS Thruway days) and, went to school for a week to learn how to do that. He became the top burner serviceman for the company, and did that until his heart attack in 1959. After that he was put into a desk job and eventually became manager of the company.
Along with the full-time job with Pulver, he started his life’s dream, to have a dairy farm. How did he get that dream, when the only connection with cows he had growing up was the family no doubt having a cow for milk at some time? Who knows. But he learned all he could about cows and farming and away we went, buying a farm (plus some machinery and one cow) when I was 6.
The farm lasted about 13 or 14 years (my sister can correct me on this); when she married a guy who also wanted to dairy farm they ran it for a while, but that ended badly and the cows were sold in the early 1960’s.
He was about 6 months away from retirement when he died.
But, he would never have retired, because there always would have been another project, another something new to learn and try. When he died I said ‘I wish he could have done all the things he wanted to – but then again he never would have because there would have been something new coming along all the time’.
A couple of stories about my father: He was the first man in New York State known to shoot a deer with a bow and arrow since the time of the Indians. He got interested in bow hunting, and went up to Indian Lake (there was no better place to hunt, in his opinion). On the way up, he stopped at a small mountain gas station and got talking with the owner and mentioned the bow hunting. The other man scoffed, and said no one could shoot a deer with a bow and arrow. My father did. He had to chase the deer a little ways through the woods to get to where it dropped, but he did it. On the way home he stopped at the same station, and while the owner was standing by the back of the car putting the gas in, my father just walked around and casually opened the trunk, where the deer lay, causing mush sputtering and ‘How did?’ from the other guy. He was written up in the New York Times for that.
Which leads to another story: most farm machinery is by nature large, awkward and dangerous, some more than other pieces. One of the more dangerous we had for a while was a corn husker. It was two long cylinders with some type of rough covering (I can’t remember exactly what that was, what I am thinking is some sort of metal or wooded or both slats going lengthwise down the rolls, but not sure on that) that were angled down from top to bottom of the machine and turned towards each other. You put ears of corn at the top and the rollers caught the husk and by the time the ear got to the bottom it was stripped, and fell into a container that you had to keep emptying. That was our job, to many, many, many warning not to get our hands near the rollers because the machine would take them off. Well, one night, my father was husking corn, went to push an ear that wasn’t catching into the rollers and his glove got caught and pulled his hand in. He managed to pull it out of the glove, but not before some finger damage was done; he lost the tip of one, had to have skin grafts on another and two or three of them were permanently crooked. His main concern was whether he would still be able to pull the bow string. One of his roommates was a reporter with the NY Times, who said that if he ever shot a deer to let him know, he’d do a story.
My father had his share of mishaps, but he didn’t like to admit it. One of the most famous was the winter night he was spreading the manure and got the tractor and spreader stuck at the far end of our pond – he thought it was frozen enough to drive across and it wasn’t. He walked down to the house, and never said a word, just called a neighbor to come up to give him a hand with ‘something’ and bring a heavy chain. It took some pulling and cussing but they got it out. This was a couple of weeks before Christmas, and for a gift, the neighbor put together a little scene with snow, a mirror for a pond, and a little tractor in the middle of the pond, on a bar of Ivory soap – because ‘it floats’.
When I was 6 or 7, one night I couldn’t sleep, and went downstairs while my parents were still up. He took me on his lap and sang ‘Daddy’s Little Girl’.
When I was about 13, he didn’t like my current ‘boyfriend’ and pretty much said I shouldn’t see him any more, or at least that was how I heard it. I had my bags packed that night to run away from home. Never did it, but my bags were packed.
When I was learning to drive, he tried and tried to teach me how to double clutch to shift our old farm truck. Didn’t work. When I was driving truck, I learned, and thought of him. I asked my mother what he would have thought of my doing that. We agreed that he would have given a little giggle – and wanted to come along on a trip with me.
He died doing one of the things he loved most, hunting in the woods near Indian Lake. Well, technically he died in the hospital the next day, but for all intent and purposes, that was the last thing he was doing. As one of his companions said, that’s about the best last thing you could do, and the prettiest last place you could be.
I still miss him. I have evidence that he’s still around, though, but those are other stories.
To all of you who are, Happy Father’s Day.

Random Things

I just made a cup of tea. I have an electric pot, it’s intended for making coffee, but since I don’t do that, I took the innards out and just heat water in it. Yes, I have a teakettle, but I have a bad habit of turning the stove on under that and forgetting I did. The electric one shuts itself off. There’s a little round doohickey on the base that I presume is where the connection between pot and plug is. I sometimes wonder what would happen if I put my finger on that. Would I get a shock, or get electrocuted or would nothing happen? Don’t wonder enough to try it, though.
It’s gonna rain here again, later today, the predictions are. We now could do with a few days of non-rain. And it’s been unseasonably cool all month. What happened to the global warming? Yeah, we’ll be complaining the other way when it gets hot, which it is supposed to do next week. Weather predicting fascinates me – high pressure, low pressure – all that is a mystery to me. What made people figure out those things, anyway? ‘Gee, I think I’ll put some of this mercury stuff in a glass tube and make marks on it and then we can tell just how hot or cold it is, because we can’t do with just being hot or cold we have to know how much of each is happening’. The people who invented stuff like that were amazing.
Speaking of rain, I’ve got more leaks in more buildings than I can keep track of. There’s a leak over the stage manager’s desk that has been there for years, and nobody has been able to find exactly where it is coming from. The handyman I had started to shingle the roof, but then he left and the bundles of shingles are sitting up there waiting for the rain to stop long enough for the new guy to finish the job. The former one put a new roof on part of a cast house but he didn’t finish the job so when it rains there’s a waterfall down one wall of one room. There’s a leak in the men’s rest room ceiling, which was being directed into the sink by a judiciously placed pencil hole in the ceiling tile, but that got waterlogged the other day and fell down, so now the leak goes onto the middle of the floor. Oh, and we found a new, good sized one in the rehearsal room ceiling a week or so ago, I think that’s from a big tree limb that fell on the roof during the ice storm. And of course the hole in the other house roof from the tree that fell on it, that we are waiting on the insurance people to get their act together to resolve so it can be fixed. Plus, the first handyman said there was a leak into the kitchen of that house but nobody else has noticed anything so that might not be for real.
Yeah, and the other day when it was raining hard I was in my bathroom and felt drip –drip – drip coming from the corner of the skylight, so I have to get someone up there to check what that’s about.
Anybody want a job fixing roofs?
My good news is that Streetcar is recovered from his abscess and infection. And back to his bratty self. When I took the collar off that he had on to keep him from chewing the stitches on the drain he had in, he licked himself all over for about half an hour straight.
Found the grandson on Facebook the other day. He’s apparently been on it for a long time, but was very surprised that Meema was able to do such modern stuff. Of course, he tried to chat the other night and by the time I figured out that you just click Enter to post your part of the message, he was gone. I admit to being electronically illiterate. Most of the stuff on Facebook I can’t figure out how to do, but it is kinda fun to see what other people post.
Guess I better get my day going here. Have to send a promo mailing to camps, post the first children’s show cast list, two shows, have a meeting with the children’s theatre director, music director and stage manager, coffee house – at least with this being a real short show won’t be too late tonight getting home. And children’s theatre hasn’t started yet, so mornings are a little flexible and not quite as early. Oh, and since I am going to Maine Monday to pick up the Beauty and the Beast costumes, I have to start taking orders for lobster. Because nobody can go to Maine without bringing back lobster.
Everybody have a good weekend!

A memory a day . . . June . . . .

Just because it’s June, June, June . . . those last days of school, waiting so hard for it to be over and vacation to start. Studying for final exams, would you pass to the next grade and what if you didn’t, sitting in class staring out the window thinking what you could be doing if not ‘trapped’ in school on these lovely days. Walking up the hill from where the bus dropped us off to home, on the dusty dirt road, the smell of the dust, and the wild flowers waving along the side – there were little white ones, on tall stalks, my father called them ‘snaps’ because if you plucked the flower off the stem and snapped it against the back of your hand it would make a very satisfying ‘snap’ or ‘POP’ noise.
There were peony bushes all along the front of our house, and we would pick them to stick in our hair, or maybe bring to a teacher. Oh, they were so pretty, big lush pink and white blooms.
Helping plant the garden, starting to think about which cows to work with over the summer to take to the fair, hoping for an early first cutting of hay even though it would mean all the haying work would start.
Warm days turning hotter, bare feet, shorts, the first day to go swimming! Sitting out on the lawn in the evening, often after dark, with my parents and often other friends or family. It often came before June, but that first evening it was warm enough to sit outside and have a beer.
One year a friend and I rode our horses to the school, we did not have to go if we didn’t have an exam, so we rode over there, quite a ride because we had to plan it on the back roads so as not to be riding along the highway – and we got in trouble (now there’s a surprise!) for riding on the track.
Father’s Day, and my father’s birthday (June 21) were often on the same day, and we would have strawberry shortcake to celebrate those and the end of school.
Graduation. First job away from home.
June is a transition month, bringing us into full summer. And those are some more memories for another time.

A couple of May 31 memories

A MEMORY A DAY

What was I thinking, that I’d actually get to write one thing a day? I shoulda known better! But here goes a little bit for this – week - - -
May 31. I remember when Memorial Day was on May 31, no matter when Monday was on the calendar. Sometimes I think we’ve lost for making things more convenient, but whatever.
I remember walking and riding in parades. One parade, when I was very young, and it might not even have been Memorial Day, but anyway – it was in Stuyvesant Falls, I’m thinking probably it was the Sunday School classes from the Catholic Church, that’s where we went, and one of my aunt’s was a teacher, she’d have gotten us all into the parade. Anyway, there’s a creek running through the middle of the town, with a fairly high bridge over the little gorge that it goes through after the falls. It was then (might still be) an open grate deck bridge. I was marching along just fine (and I can’t march in step to save my soul, but it didn’t matter then, at least not to me) until I got to that bridge. Got partway across and realized I could look down through the deck and see the rocks and water and falls below me. Well, if I could see them, I could fall through and be there. I froze. No amount of talking got me going and I think someone finally carried me off the bridge. The part I still remember is just standing there looking down at the terrifying sight underneath me, I can still see the rushing water. Still not real fond of that kind of bridge.
When I had horses and we had the 4-H Horse Club, we rode in parades. Our ’uniform’ was blue jeans, white shirts, green bandana and cowboy hat, things everybody had. It was great fun, we would carry the American Flag and a 4-H flag, and always get cheers, of course. Once I had to borrow a hat for some reason, and it was too big – someone took pictures that showed a hat sitting on a set of shoulders.
We must have had picnics, quite possibly at one of the aunt and uncle’s, with lots of cousins there, I remember big picnics, but don’t specifically know if they were for a holiday or the family reunion, we had both.
Spring’s a good time to look ahead, but every day’s a good time to look back, too.
That’s my memory for today, now I gotta get ready for work.