A century ago, doctors could cure almost nothing They were friends of the family who tried their best to make you feel better, to ease your fever and your pain.
Today, a vast raft of diseases can be cured or alleviated, resulting in 8 billion people on our beleaguered planet, at least half of them homeless, miserable and ill-fed.
Ah, progress.
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Westclox still makes an alarm clock that’s almost identical to the one I got as a present on my 8th birthday. For some reason, I remember that the most of any birthday present I got.
Grinning like a goof, I picked one up at our local hardware store. The current version’s no longer a windup, but battery powered. The alarm I’d set went off while I was out, but according to Linda, it makes the same deafening clatter it did back then.
The down side in my old-guyhood? It’s engineered to tick as loud as if it was still a windup, and there’s no way to mute it. If I wake in the middle of the night, it’s like a little critter trying to pound its way into my head.
I may try sticking it in an open-faced box of foam insulation. I think in this case they’ve carried nostalgia a little too far for me.
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The Van Pelts were a major family in Philadelphia, as were the O’Hares in Chicago.
If Maisie Van Pelt of Philadelphia were to marry Clark O’Hare of Chicago, would she become Maisie Van Pelt O’Hare?
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When my mom was writing minstrel shows [yes, I composed a whole column about that some time back] and I was about 12, she bought a black Halloween skeleton costume and brushed over all the bones with luminous paint so I could – and did – dance on the darkened stage to the cast singing that “knee bone connected to the thigh bone” song.
As all too often, I was feeling sick during one of the performances but soldiered on – and had great fun doing it.
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Alexander the Great – hell of a guy – died at age 33. That was historically noted. I’ve wondered if that recorded fact influenced the later assumption that Jesus died at 33, considering there’s no clear evidence of exactly how old he was when they strung him up?
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I’ve never liked “popular” music of any era I’ve lived through. The closest was in the ’60s, but then it was more the folk-revival musicians than pop.
Though I loved David Bowie as an actor, I never much enjoyed his music and was totally indifferent to his Ziggy Stardust persona. I think that started when I first heard “Space Oddity,” one of the dumbest, most annoying songs I’ve run across. As for The Police, they made me want to puke.
I recall almost nothing of the ‘80s and haven’t heard 90 percent of the current pop singers. [It’s not as hard to avoid them as you might think form the headlines.] A week ago I finally heard something recent by Taylor Swift. It was totally predictable pop, sounding like everything else, as I expected.
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Around age nine I bought a weird ring advertised on one of the 15-minute radio serials that ran at supper time. (For some reason, I link it mentally to the Tom Mix western show, but far more likely it was Captain Midnight, tales of the leader of a fighter squadron.)
It wasn’t a “decoder ring,” which became popular somewhere in there, but a simple circlet topped with a small torpedo shape that you held up to your eye to see an “atomic explosion.”
It turned out to show a few pinpricks of light randomly hopping around. It was enough of a disappointment that I never ordered anything else advertised on the radio or in the back of a comic book again.
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“Williamsport, the City that Hates Visitors!”
When we took Marigold in for some minor surgery at the Wolf Run vet clinic about ten days ago, we decided to spend the waiting period in Williamsport, about twenty minutes further away. It’s the largest town in the area, with its own symphony orchestra [quite good] and the home of Little League baseball.
Now, I want to make clear at the start that I have nothing at all against anyone we’ve met or dealt with there. They all treated us splendidly. It’s about the glooming feeling of the place itself that if you don’t live there you should go elsewhere as rapidly as possible.
The main streets will suddenly turn one-way against you for no discernible reason. Any road near I-180, the main highway, runs you through an absurd tangle of traffic circles, often leading you back to where you came. The feeling I get is, “You can’t get there from here, and don’t you dare try.”
We wanted to stop for a late breakfast. Any town of any size up here has a café or deli. We walked for blocks along 3rd St. in Williamsport, their main drag. Nothing that opened before noon, until we found a side door to their major hotel.
Yes, serving breakfast! A lovely, pleasant young woman pointed us to a room with an amazing array of serve-yourself goodies. Yum. Linda chose a muffin and cream cheese. I got an English muffin and butter. How were we to pay, where and when? Somehow, when I tracked down our “server,” I couldn’t get that request to register with her.
While we ate, a few stranglers came in and it became obvious that the restaurant was really set up for the hotel guests. When our server came back, we explained that we “came in off the street.”
Oh, then we’d have to pay the basic rate, since the area was set up for guests to eat as much as they liked. So, $14 each.
Fourteen dollars for an English muffin.
After our break-the-bank brunch, we stopped at the Thomas Taber Museum, which covers the history of Lycoming County. Lovely place, wonderful reception and explanation at the counter, and though a few exhibits seemed a bit out of date, really pleasantly arranged to feed you through the interconnected rooms.
What really gets me about central Williamsport is that huge areas are set aside for parking, but none are kosher unless you’re the patron of a particular business – and if you dare choose to park where unwanted “you will be prosecuted.”
Even so, I later parked on a spot reserved for clients of a law firm. They have yet to send us a citation. Previously, I had parked on the street by the most complicated parking meter on record; couldn’t figure out how to put money in, so we were again illegal. But we appear to have escaped unscathed, though I was surprised we could tramp the sidewalks without being asked for our ID.
lickhaven 