Corrections and other New Year’s resolutions

Homework assignment: Write on a yellow pad of lined paper, 1,000 times, “I will not reverse the roles of Robert Oppenheimer and Wernher von Braun.”

I do not know why I got their names and roles backward, but when I wrote about my last motorcycle ride of the year, to Fort Ritchie with a friend, I erred. An astute reader wrote to bring it to my attention, and it’s a serious enough error that it deserves correcting.

Continue reading Corrections and other New Year’s resolutions

They’ll never miss it

There’s been a bit of discussion lately about a lost respect for police. In furtherance of that discussion, consider Exhibit A.

It’s Christmas. You need a Christmas tree, but every tree retailer in the county is sold out.

On the other hand, there are some really nice specimens growing in the national park. Sure, there are laws against cutting trees in the park forest, but you tell yourself it’s really a victimless crime. You take the tree home, decorate it, and gather friends and family to celebrate the festive day.

Continue reading They’ll never miss it

No Training Wheels

I am sitting in the living room, reading a book and watching the news, when the doorbell rings. Almost immediately, the door swings in, followed closely by an excited little girl.

“Papa John! Papa John!”

Right here in the story I could leave the reader with the notion that Papa John’s the most important person, but actually I was just the first person in view. And when you’re excited and have to tell a grownup something important …

“Papa John,” she cried out.. “I can ride my bike-without-training-wheels! Come see me ride my bike-without-training-wheels.” Continue reading No Training Wheels

Tastes of Christmas

Candy Cane Peeps! What’s that about?

We found them in the grocery store this week, little white marshmallow chicks, with red flecks of red peppermint. Beside the first box was a slightly more expensive set. I wondered why the extra cost until I saw the bottom of the chicks had been dipped in chocolate.

I have gone through life knowing Peeps are yellow and come for Easter, to be stashed on top of the refrigerator, at the back where they are not easily reached, until they are discovered sometime in late summer, dried to a perfect chewiness. It will not be long, I suppose, until they bear a label proclaiming new Peeps to be “Perfectly Chewy.”

But they did tickle my memories of other Christmas treats.

Continue reading Tastes of Christmas

Questions from Ferguson

Years as a reporter covering courts have taught me most of us can read or watch the news and decide whether the accused is guilty. The most graphic illustration in my memory came at the end of the OJ Simpson murder trial.

For those who may not remember, the former black football and movie star was accused of knifing to death his white ex-wife and her alleged boyfriend, also white. When Simpson’s trial ended in 1995, the jury said he was not guilty.

Continue reading Questions from Ferguson

Giving thanks

Nephew Greg is downstairs, and his dad and mom and one of his sisters and her two offspring. We were not sure my sister would show up, but her need to aid in the final scenes of another family member has come to its natural conclusion.

My cousin Betty left us Monday morning. She and I were within months of the same age, but from there, we differed some. When we were kids, I lived on the shore of a lake in Maine; she lived in suburban Long Island. I thought skinny-dipping in the lake after a long day’s work was a relaxing experience; Betty could never see the point in living in a place so secluded one could get away with even thinking of skinny-dipping.

Continue reading Giving thanks

Heavy snow coming? Bring it on.

Snow outside my windowI‘ve often wondered about the link between television weather guys and grocery supermarkets.

The thought came to me one evening when I lived in Maine and went to visit a friend about 45 miles from our home. The visit was to be a birthday celebration, after which we would stay overnight – the latter plan, in part, because the television weather guy had proclaimed a wicked storm would occur whilst we slept.

Continue reading Heavy snow coming? Bring it on.

At last, I’ve found my milk

Fresh raw milk awaits in Oyler's Organic Farm's refrigeratorI like raw milk. I will die one day, I am told, but I think I would not blame the milk.

On the other hand, it could be dangerous when carried in the handlebar basket of a teenager’s bicycle. We picked up two gallons of milk every other day from a nearby dairy farm. One day, as I coasted down Norton Hill on the way home, I met a car speeding the other way, enough on my side I was forced off the pavement.

I rode onto the berm, and when I tried to get back on the pavement, it gave way, and down I went. I broke my pointing finger and tore my thumbnail. I’m pretty sure the two gallons of raw milk had little, if anything to do with the fall, though they did make the front of the bike about 16 pounds heavier coming home than going away.

Years later, I became a journalist, and wrote a story about Kenton Bailey, a seventh-generation Mainer and the last fellow in the state to deliver raw milk door-to-door – though he would not allow me to call it “raw.” The word upset some people, he said. I had to call it “unprocessed.”

One of the treats of drinking raw milk is you can taste when the cows are put in the barn for winter, and when they go to the pasture in summer. It is a subtle accent on the flavor.

Milk we buy in a grocery story has been so mixed up it’s lost all its character. A tank truck picks up milk from Farmer Jones, then Farmer Smith and Farmer Brown and the white liquid slosh-mixes on its way to the processing plant, where it is dumped in huge tanks to mix with milk from farmers McBride, McHugh and McGillicutty.

Continue reading At last, I’ve found my milk

Carbon-and-valve, hold the camera

Ghost of an early service stationLately, I’ve been contemplating the merits of replacing my Grand Cherokee. She’s 13 years old, which is a long time for dogs and cars. The decision is more complicated than when I bought my first car.

When I was a youth, the maintenance schedule for our family chariot included a “carbon and valve” job. Charlie Bates’ garage did not have a lift to hoist the car up. Instead, a pit was dug into the floor; you drove the car over the pit and climbed down underneath it.

Continue reading Carbon-and-valve, hold the camera

Report: Lawmakers’ poor environmental performance

Long Pine Reservoir.Three conservation organizations have released their 2014 environmental scorecard, giving Pennsylvania lawmakers poor grades for protecting the environment in which we all live.

[pullquote]Place the right industry near the creek and the effect of all that work is gone.[/pullquote]

The report had been delayed to await the results of a Senate vote on a House initiated bill that essentially makes voluntary previously mandatory requirements that developers protect the state’s high value waterways as they pursue corporate profits. The Senate approved, and as I write this the bill awaits the signature of Gov. Tom Corbett, R-Marcellus, to turn it into law.

Continue reading Report: Lawmakers’ poor environmental performance

Vacations are about the people

A 985-pound Johnson-powered pumpkin

Going on vacation is loads of fun, especially in the people we meet. Like the night in Maine last week when we had dinner at the Salt Bay Café in Damariscotta, Maine. Couples three were we, sitting to our first dinner on the rocky coast of the Pine Tree State. We each ordered our favorite choice of fresh-from-the sea fare.

[pullquote]… he would grow a pumpkin – his first “boat” was 754 pounds – and build the boat, but he would not get in it.[/pullquote]

I had oysters. I love the things on the half-shell, with jalapeño relish to spice ’em up a touch.

Continue reading Vacations are about the people

Burning Bridges

Bridges of booksLast month, a Jefferson County, Colorado school board proposed modifying its Advanced Placement U.S. History course. “Materials should not encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law,” the proposal stated. The new requirements would “promote citizenship, patriotism, essentials and benefits of the free-market system, respect for authority and respect for individual rights.”

[pullquote]“Stories mean more when they are in the words of real people,”[/pullquote]
Civil disobedience, it appears, would not be part of the curriculum.

Continue reading Burning Bridges

Autumnal Absorption

Mornings are foggy, though not so much near the ground. In airplane parlance, the “ceiling” is a couple hundred feet above the surface, visibility likely measured in miles, were not the line of site interrupted by hills and curves. I’ll take the hills and curves over straight line of sight, though, any day.

Seen from inside the house, signs of incipient winter decorate the landscape. Rust colored leaves torn from the oak in front of our home, sometimes flutter like a fishing lure tossed into a still water pool, sometimes flow horizontally like an invisibly crystaline river  carrying its flotsam to the ocean.

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Hey, I turned out OK! Not!

Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice knocked his wife unconscious in an elevator, and from the way the case was handled one might easily think his major offense was doing it where a camera would catch him at it.

For messing up his girlfriend, Rice got a two-game suspension. A new NFL policy would get a four-game suspension for a player caught messing himself up with human growth hormones.

Continue reading Hey, I turned out OK! Not!

Two families, two empty chairs

I‘ve been working on these thoughts since a couple nights ago, when our son was perusing his smartphone and reported a police officer had been ambushed and killed. My first thoughts were several, wrapped in “if you felt a driving need to kill someone, probably a cop was not the best choice.”

A fellow columnist led me to Cpl. Bryon Dickson’s Facebook page. Dickson’s profile picture is of Abraham Lincoln, possibly referring to an interest of Dickson’s, and possibly to avoid putting his picture online for bad guys to use to identify him. When your job is putting bad people where they cannot injure other citizens, you sometimes make enemies for whom vengeance is a serious mission. Not many, but it only takes one.

Continue reading Two families, two empty chairs

Stork is a 3-letter word

Stork deliversI liked Joan Rivers. In “Tonight Show” doses, she was hilarious, and made Dad guffaw. Now she’s gone. The world keeps spinning, but there’s a hole where Joan Rivers stood.

She was 81, and it was her turn. One day, it will be mine. A friend’s brother visited two weeks ago and was the picture of health. He went home and had a heart attack. The doctors opened him up like the little guy on the TV series “Extant,” fiddled with some of his plumbing and circuitry, and David is doing just fine. It wasn’t his turn.

Last week I watched the NBC and ABC “documentaries” about Rivers. Continue reading Stork is a 3-letter word

Beauty leads to love leads to beauty

Dahlias on the stem
Downtown is eerily quiet. The tourists have gone home, and there is plenty of parking. It’s a cliché to say the season is changing, when truth is the seasons never stop changing as the planet on its tilted celestial spindle angles its forehead toward and then away from the warming sun. After a couple weeks of denial, I finally must acknowledge that the seeming storm clouds blanketing me at 4:30 in the afternoon are really sundown moved up from it’s temporary 9 p.m. time slot.

In similar manner, morning comes a few hours later, and though a short time ago I was able to read in bed without the intrusion of artificial light, now there is insufficient illumination on the page and I am faced with the choice of getting up or remaining there in the comfort of my best friend breathing beside me in the unwaning dawn.

A fellow named Socrates noted beauty leads us to love, Continue reading Beauty leads to love leads to beauty

Good guys (sometimes) wear white hats

It’s great fun to sit by the stream and watch the oak leaves start raining down on the earth. They’ll become fertilizer to make more leaves next year. I do like a place with seasons.

Soon will be time to get Babe the Blue (Harley) Moose onto some curving mountain roads, among the multi-colored maples, birches, poplars and other natural topiary.

Continue reading Good guys (sometimes) wear white hats

Rural Directions

Friends, meet Staci “Mrs. Matt” Gower. Readers of the Gettysburg Times may remember her as Staci George, an energetic police and fire reporter who eagerly responded to blazing infernos, kept her fingers on a plethora of social events, and once returned to the office with a tip that led to a Public Service award for the paper.

Staci is a detail-oriented young woman who, responding to my request for information to feed the GPS, led us thusly to a diner for the post-rehearsal repast, last weekend:

“When leaving the church, go down the road toward the beer distributor on the left (you’ll see on your way to church). Continue reading Rural Directions

Granddaughter stars on discovery channel

Bluebird hovers at the houseOn the way from one place to another, she and me and Grady the Golden and the Jeep crossed over a stream. She saw the herd of cattle enjoying the summer afternoon.

“That’s pretty cool,” I commented.

She gave me a thumbs up.

Continue reading Granddaughter stars on discovery channel