Actually, it’s pretty easy, although the first year requires a bit more effort. To get started, visit some government and business websites and grab some of the most interesting content. Your taxes and supermarket purchases paid for that stuff, why not use it?
Hurricane coming? Head over to the AARP site (also good for finding scary scam warnings to pass along) and copy their advice on what to have in your hurricane Go Bag. Be sure to give the AARP credit, they can be an advice columnist’s best friend.
Once you’ve built up an inventory of questions, advice, recipes, and material glommed from official sites, you can use and occasionally reuse them. People are afraid of hurricanes, so hurricane advice is generally a winner. The season lasts only from June through November, so don’t wear it out.
Keep in mind you’ll need enough words to fill a newspaper column every day. Keeping paragraphs short will give you extra white space. If it looks like you still won’t have enough words, paste in your contact addresses, breaking them across several lines:
Send a helpful idea to:
Helperlady
P. O. Box 14364
Scranton, PA 18503
or fax it to 1-570-HELPERLADY
or email it to helperlady@helperlady.com
Please mention your city and state.
Column still not full? Double-space those contacts.
Try to choose at least one reader question or idea each week that deals with a health subject currently in the news:
Dear Helperlady: What is this “clean eating” I keep hearing about? Should I do it? Am I doing it already? Is it anything like the scene in Fight Club where Marla orders a meal, Jack tells the waiter “Clean food, please”, and the waiter replies “In that case, sir, may I advise against the clam chowder”? — Mary Ellen in Cincinatti
Start your answer “According to the Mayo Clinic” and summarize whatever Mayo says about “clean eating”, or other health-related subject. Tell the reader to be sure to drink a lot of water. There, you’ve got half a column. Out of ideas? Print your contact addresses again, it’s been two weeks.
Interested in bread? Want to write a column about it? Come up with a cool title and quote some stuff from wholegrainscouncil.org. “All grains start life as whole grains…”. Be sure to give the Council credit for understanding their own business. There, you’re done, and it’s not even cocktail time yet.
Don’t discard absurd or obvious reader ideas out-of-hand, they fill up column space and can give your readers a smile:
Dear Helperlady: When you write a phone number for a restaurant or such in your address book, add the hours it is open and when it closes. When you need to phone the place and it is closed, you’ll know when to call again. — M.G. in Miami
An allusion to the possibility of being “left alone” can create anxiety and build loyalty to your column:
Dear Helperlady: Wives, in your telephone book, make a list of those repairmen you trust and might need if you are left alone without your “problem solver”. Below is a starter list:
— Furnace conked out – call Tony, with phone number.
— Plumber – name and phone number.
— Electrician, etc.
This list is helpful if you are left alone and something breaks down or goes kerflooey. — Susan Soo in Michigan
Next, here’s where recycling the early stuff can really shorten your workday:
Dear Helperlady: You have a recipe for peach cobbler that my husband loves! Would you please reprint it? I have misplaced my copy and he’s been in a sulk. — Cora Mae in Yakima
Cora Mae, this delicious recipe is also a favorite of my own. You’ll need:
3 cups flour
2 cups sugar
etc., etc. – the longer the list, the better.
Double space if you need to.
You can also run a side gig of organizing loosely-related items you’ve already printed into pamphlets and selling them for five dollars:
For a list of (household product) uses including cleaning, cooking and even beauty tips, order my six-page (household product) pamphlet by visiting www.helperlady.com, or by sending a long, self-addressed, stamped (70 cents) envelope together with $5 to: Helperlady / (household product), P. O. Box 14364, Scranton, PA 18503
Yes, Dallas. Even sixty years later, that name brings sad memories to those who were watching television on November 22nd, 1963 and over the long weekend that followed.
From the moment we heard that shots had been fired at the President’s motorcade, then later heard Walter Cronkite’s announcement that the President was dead, we could not take our eyes off the screen.
Stunned, we watched over and over the motorcade turn into the Dealey Plaza ambush, the President be shot, Jackie reach for something, the limousine speed off to the hospital.
We watched the vigil outside the emergency room, we watched Air Force One’s return to Washington with the President’s body and the new President, we watched the thousands of mourners pass by the casket, we watched over and over Jack Ruby kill Oswald, we watched the funeral procession, we watched Jackie at the grave.
We had a Thanksgiving, winter came, we had a Christmas, then more winter.
Then, on February 9th, we watched a new band called the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show.
Somehow, when we went to bed that night, we felt like everything was going to be all right.
I never lived in California, but I visited there many times on business trips and came to love it. Here are a few things that stayed with me from those visits, arranged in no particular order. If I have some details wrong or backwards, apologies to my companions on those trips, who became my friends. Writing this, I couldn’t remember a lot of detail about the actual work we did as a team, and didn’t try. But I remember very well the good times we had on side trips sightseeing and exploring California—or just hanging out—when we were not working.
Cars make their way down Lombard Street
Most of my California trips were to San Francisco, Santa Clara or other towns in “Silicon Valley”, the hub of America’s high-tech computer business. On a different trip I got to visit Los Angeles, but only for a three-hour layover between planes. I was alone on that trip and took a walk from the terminal building down to the bottom of the main road in, where I sat on a low wall to catch some sun. Sitting there alone, I felt as if every person who turned onto the airport road that day was checking me out. That’s no credit to me – in California everyone is checking everyone else out all day long. It is the land of opportunity.
Job interview
My first California trip was for a job interview. After working for Continental Insurance/Insco for a few years, I was looking for a change. I saw an ad for VM programmers at the Amdahl Corporation in Sunnyvale, another Silicon Valley town. Amdahl was the new kid on the block then, making full-size mainframe computers and giving IBM a run for its money. I sent them a resume, we had a short interview over the phone, and before I knew it I was on a plane headed west.
The San Jose airport was so small that the entire rental car fleet sat right outside the terminal door. Japanese cars were just becoming popular, and the one I rented was the first I ever drove. I spent the evening getting a feel for California —just driving around the hilly green countryside, no other cars in sight. I forget what make it was, but it was peppy and fun to drive, and I gave it some exercise.
Fact sheet courtesy Wikipedia
The next morning I drove to Sunnyvale for my interview. First I met with the personnel manager and we had a nice, friendly conversation, mostly about California, its hot housing market, and our families. He seemed to be a happy person, but at one point surprised me by dropping “You’ll find that most people in California are very shallow” into the conversation.
Next I met with a pair of technical managers and told them about all the cool software modifications and tools I’d designed and added to Continental’s VM operating system. Unfortunately I got caught up in trying to show that I wasn’t just the usual inward-focused bit-jockey systems programmer, but also a team player and leader. I shot myself in the foot by injecting the words “we” and “my team” into the conversation too often. Free advice to job seekers everywhere: don’t be modest. I didn’t take enough credit for my own work that day, and I didn’t get the job.
Housing boom
On a different trip, I shared a taxi with a gent from back East who was headed to the same hotel. We were talking about the booming real estate market, and I mentioned a newspaper story that said many Californians were stretching to carry mortgages on second or even third houses, counting on big future profits. We were still shaking our heads over the madness of this when our driver, silent until then, said “I’ve got six.”
The project
For a while, Continental had a sort of flirtation with several computer companies to decide which could best replace the aging workstations in its 40 branch offices. Our team would test and evaluate proposed replacements.
I sometimes had my doubts about whether the project to find a replacement branch office machine was on the level. Our management was very conservative about choosing computers and computer gear, seeming to honor the adage “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” —meaning, if you chose IBM and it somehow didn’t work out, it was still a reasonable choice because IBM was the world standard. Any fault would be IBM’s, not yours.
IBM didn’t yet offer a suitable small machine, so maybe our management was stalling in hopes they would have one soon, solving the problem for everyone.
The team
Our first team trip will be to Convergent Technologies in Santa Clara. We’ll be testing their latest minicomputer. In a few weeks, we’ll do the same thing at Hewlett Packard.
There are four of us on the team, representing four different Continental departments. We don’t know each other yet. As team leader, I get to drive the rental and am generally deferred to. When our plane lands in California, it’s a sunny, pleasant day. Once we’re out of the airport and on our way to the hotel, I ask “Would it be a good idea to open the windows?” There is a happy chorus of YES PLEASE!
In the Castro
We have a free day before testing begins and decide to go to San Francisco. Looking for a place to have dinner, we wander into a busy neighborhood and get in line outside a restaurant that seems popular. We are three men and a young woman only two years out of college. She is pretty and sweet and smart, and by the end of the day each of the men is half in love with her.
A sign tells us we’re in the Castro District. She says “Oh, the Castro District! That’s the gay section!” Many of the people in line with us or passing by appear to be of the rainbow persuasion, some very much so. In an excited whisper, she asks “Do you think we’ll see any gay people?”
At Convergent Technologies
The Convergent people have set up a row of their workstation computers for us in one corner of their factory floor and we get started. Our hosts make us think of the Avis “We try harder” slogan – they are desperate for our business and it shows, sometimes to the point of being embarrassing. Spotting my half-empty cigarette pack on the table, one of them offers to go buy me another.
Convergent has a cafeteria, but a Mexican food truck visits our side of the factory several times a day and we come to favor the exotic food off the truck.
None of us has ever seen the Pacific Ocean, and one day after work we take a drive west to the nearest beach.
Not the same beach, but like it
The beach is wild and rocky, not at all like the friendly, flat beaches back home in New Jersey. No one will ever play in the surf here, or lie on a towel to work on their tan.
We roll up our pants legs, stow shoes and socks in the car, and walk into the chilly water. The ocean here is calm, with flattish boulders washed over by low, polite waves. As the tide goes out, tiny crabs and other marine life are stranded for a while in shallow pools on top of the boulders. If you put your hand into one it feels alive, and the salt water hot from the afternoon sun.
Free weekend
We’ll be testing at Convergent for two weeks, which gives us a weekend in between for sightseeing. Driving out of the city, we cross the Golden Gate Bridge and continue north. We are like children, staring and pointing at things not to be seen in New Jersey. We drive into a touristy redwood forest, where we sit together on the colossal stump of a thousand-year-old redwood as we eat lunch and marvel at our surroundings. We follow signs that lead us to a winery tour, then wear out our welcome at its sampling bar. On our way back we shout out in unison a town name we see on a highway sign, “SNAVELY!”
Lombard Street
Another day we take our rental for a ride down San Francisco’s Lombard Street, known as “The Crookedest Street in the World”. Lombard Street got that way in the 1920s, when the city installed eight hairpin curves to reduce its dangerously steep downhill grade. Over the following years, taking a slow ride down Lombard Street became a favorite tourist thing to do, with the street eventually becoming so congested it created a quality-of-life issue for its homeowners.
When Lombard Street is not too crowded, it’s a fun, careful drive, offering scenic views of San Francisco Bay, Alcatraz, and the suspension bridges to Oakland. When we took that ride years ago, we enjoyed it so much we made our way back to the top and went again, drawing annoyed looks from a few homeowners who remembered us from our earlier pass.
On the fault line
A few weeks after finishing up at Convergent Technologies and writing our report, we return to California to run the same tests at Hewlett Packard in Palo Alto, a town halfway between San Jose and San Francisco.
Much of California is on the 800-mile-long San Andreas fault. Map courtesy adobe.com
Hewlett Packard wants visitors to be aware its buildings in Palo Alto are on the San Andreas fault, the earthquake-prone sliding boundary between two of the Earth’s major tectonic plates. Hewlett takes earthquakes seriously and thinks visitors should too. Their buildings are low and stubby, and thus less likely to fall over. They are laid out around a central open quad with enough space for all employees to gather safely during a quake. If there’s not enough warning to get out into the quad, the next best thing is to crawl under a desk or other furniture. If that’s not possible, stand in one of the reinforced doorways.
Survival poster
I won’t detail the testing we did in the two weeks we were at Hewlett Packard because it wasn’t much different from what we did at Convergent. Nor will I detail any of the side trips or other fun we may have had outside work hours while at Hewlett. To any of my former management who might happen to have lived long enough to read this, rest assured that we all worked very hard and didn’t have anywhere near as much fun as it sounds.
What’s next for California?
I’m disgusted by the way California has gone downhill. The city I’m most familiar with, beautiful and livable San Francisco, is now often referred to as a third-world shithole. After following the news over recent years, I have to agree, and California is off the list of places I might ever want to live. Collectively, California’s problems seem unsolvable.
Smash-and-grab looting, consequence-free shoplifting, acts of violence against strangers (the knockout game). Release without bail of criminals with lengthy arrest records. Providing free drugs to addicts instead of forcing them into treatment. The criminal class has taken over, and the rule of law has ended.
Add uncontrolled wildfires, the end of standardized testing, the leftward tilt of the education system, the general failure of the schools to educate. I could go on and on.
I guess there’s always hope that something or someone will come along to fix California. Short of martial law or outright civil war, I don’t know what that might be. But I’m glad I got to enjoy California a bit before its destruction.
I recently used the last of some “Forever” postage stamps I bought years ago. They honored various abstract artists, including some I’d never heard of. One set was of a 1929 painting by Arthur Dove titled Fog Horns. When I saw them, I knew I’d be saving them for special occasions. To me, they looked like an embarrassing part of the human anatomy, and I thought they’d be a great passive-aggressive way to take a dig at an incompetent business or person.
Courtesy US Postal Service
Last week I was billed for a doctor visit that supposedly took place over a year ago. I spent an hour looking through my check register and appointment calendar to see if it was legitimate, and it was. That wasn’t really a big surprise, because this practice has a history of losing or misplacing paperwork. I wrote them a check, dropped it in an envelope and stuck on my last Fog Horns stamp. Take that, jerks.
An article at ideelart.com titled 7 Times Abstract Art and Artists Were Featured on US Stamps tells us that Fog Horns “…features three spectral forms suggestive of soundwaves created by the horns of ships lost in the fog.” Aha, soundwaves. I see.
“Years will pass before she will reappear in his mind. But when she does he will find that she is a source of happiness, available to him till the day he dies. Sometimes he will even entertain himself with thoughts of what might have happened had he taken up the offer. Secretly, he will imagine a radiant recovery, Nettie’s acquiring a tall and maidenly body, their life together. Such foolish thoughts as a man may have in secret.” –Alice Munro, The View from Castle Rock
I’m tired of people saying that some eager person is “chomping at the bit”. No, the expression is “champing at the bit” and it’s what horses do when they are eager to run; they bite down, or “champ”, on the metal “bit” in their mouth.
And if you think I’m going to let this go, you’ve got another THINK coming. Not another THING coming, another THINK. Think about what you’re saying.
Thanks for listening.
“Bridle,” I say. I hold it up to the window and look at it in the light. It’s not fancy, it’s just an old dark leather bridle. I don’t know much about them. But I know that one part of it fits in the mouth. That part’s called the bit. It’s made of steel. Reins go over the head and up to where they’re held on the neck between the fingers. The rider pulls the reins this way and that, and the horse turns. It’s simple. The bit’s heavy and cold. If you had to wear this thing between your teeth, I guess you’d catch on in a hurry. When you felt it pull, you’d know it was time. You’d know you were going somewhere.
After checking in at Labcorp, I am called to room #3, followed by the technician. After our hellos and identity confirmation, I pass along some news from the waiting-room TV.
Me, lightly: “Hey, some sorta bad news just now on the TV.”
She, a bit wary: “Oh?”
Me: “Yeah, they just said Grumpy Cat died.”
She: “Oh no!” (looks distressed)
Me: “Yeah, plus the guy on TV said ‘Grumpy THE Cat has died.’”
She, disgusted: “He didn’t. Even. Know.”
We talk a bit more about the life of Grumpy, then she draws my blood.
As I roll down my sleeve to leave, she mentions Grumpy again.
Me, solemnly: “You will never forget where you were this day.”
She, solemnly: “Yes… in Room 3, with Paul.”
I used to consider crossword puzzles a waste of time, but now that I’ve got lots of time to waste, I enjoy them.
Instant feedback on an iPad: black letters are correct, red ones are wrong. Courtesy bestcrosswords.com
I was never crazy about newspaper crossword puzzles. Too much erasing and let’s-try-this, sometimes looking for the answer page to cheat, or worse, having to turn the puzzle page upside-down to see the answers. With instant feedback, when you enter a wrong letter it shows up in red, meaning keep trying, or come back later when the neighborhood is better populated.
I wanted something to kill time while giving my brain something to do besides read and watch television. I Googled for best crosswords online. The top result was a site called bestcrosswords.com. I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed this, but there are companies on the internet claiming to be “the best” at something that actually are not. These guys are.
They have lots of high-quality, free puzzles and they add more every day. If you’re the sort of person who cheats, just click/tap “Reveal letter” or “Reveal word” – it’s up to you. Personally, I’m not going to spend an hour looking up or trying to remember “The instrument George played on Norwegian Wood“. (I cheated, it was the SITAR.)
You can solve for free. If you like the site, for $4.95 a month you can get rid of the ads, save your settings between sessions, and more. I won’t list every feature; go over there and look around. I don’t get a commission on this, I just happen to like the site.
The site’s puzzle writers have different personalities. My favorite is Barb Olson, who is Canadian and writes puzzles that are fun and interesting, and on occasion Canada-centric. At first these annoyed me, but I’m learning a lot about Canada. Right now I’m learning the province names from left to right – there’s British Columbia, Alberta, some other ones, then Nova Scotia.
I don’t know any prime ministers or hockey stars or famous Mounties, but it’s fun trying to fill in their names from the words that cross them. Canadian surnames are pretty vanilla, and there seem to be only about twenty or thirty of them, so “Smith”, “Wilson” and “McKenzie” are always good guesses.
A Barb Olson puzzle last year had a clue “Explosive that can ruin a dinner party”, with solution FBOMB. I recently looked in the archives for a copy to send someone, but it had been disappeared.
Streetcar-strike sympathizers, 1916. Photo by Bain News Service
I have a small framed print of this photo in a prominent spot in my house. When a friend noticed it for the first time, she asked me who the girls were. I couldn’t resist, and said “Oh, that’s my Aunt Mabel and my mom helping out at a streetcar strike in New York City.”
She started to say how wonderful that was, but I told her I was only kidding – what I said was just something I liked to imagine because my Aunt Mabel and my mom were both the right age to have looked like that in 1916.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
— Joyce Kilmer, “Trees”, 1913
Do you remember driving down the Garden State Parkway years ago and there were all those ugly cellphone towers? Then a few years later there were all those ugly fake trees instead?
Well, today’s more modern fake trees have a name, and it’s clever and perfect and I think a credit to the English language. I found out about all this when I read about actor Richard Gere angering his neighbors in rural Bedford, NY by donating a piece of his land to erect a cell tower that would improve the town’s emergency vehicle response times. In a classic example of NIMBY, some of Gere’s wealthy and famous neighbors object to the tower because it would spoil their views of the Bedford countryside.
That cool new name for a fake tree is monopine. If you google “monopine”, wrapped up in double quotes just like that, you’ll see some good examples of cell towers that are not quite as ugly as they used to be.
The above lines from Trees make me think of my 7th-grade teacher Miss Barnett, who loved poetry and taught us kids how to love it too. Beyond Joyce Kilmer, she favored plainspoken, left-leaning poets like Carl Sandburg, but didn’t try to indoctrinate us, letting the words speak for themselves. She treated every one of us as though we were smart.
Plinth, the original title of this article, is an odd-looking word. It means “a heavy base supporting a statue or vase.” My wife Mimi and I first became aware of the word when we were in England on vacation in 1989.
The Portland Vase, photo courtesy sylcreate.com
I know the year was 1989 because I looked up the date the newly-repaired Portland Vase (pronounced “Vahhhse” if you are British) was restored to its plinth at the British Museum.
That much-celebrated artifact, a violet-blue Roman glass urn taken from the tomb of Emperor Alexander Severus, is probably the most famous glass object in the world. Believed to date between A.D. 1 and A.D. 25, the first recorded mention of it was in 1601, as it began its travels among the collections of Pope Urban VIII, Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, and several noble Roman families including the Barberinis. During those years the vase was known as the Barberini Vase.
In the 1770s, it was sent to Britain in repayment of gambling debts incurred by Donna Cordelia Barberini. From there it came into the possession of the 3rd Duke of Portland, earning it the name it is known by today. After further travels, in 1810 the vase was transferred safely to the collection of the British Museum—so far so good.
But one afternoon in 1845, a drunken student named William Mulcahy threw a heavy sculpture onto the artifact’s glass case, smashing the vase to pieces (189 of them, to be precise), and precipitating years of news stories and three vase restorations. The first two restorations were unsatisfactory—as time passed, the glue yellowed and became visible. The third and most recent restoration, completed over the 1988 Christmas holiday, took nine months and used modern adhesives and methods. That restoration was pronounced a success and predicted to last 100 years.
John Doubleday around 1845 with his restoration of the Portland Vase and a watercolor of its shattered fragments
This is where Mimi and I come in. We had been wandering through the museum admiring such treasures as the Rosetta Stone, taken from the French after their 1801 defeat in Egypt, and the so-called Elgin Marbles, decorative friezes stripped from the Parthenon by Lord Elgin in the early 1800s. We came to a room devoted to artifacts of the Roman Empire.
The Portland Vase wasn’t in the room yet, but shortly after we entered it was rolled in and placed on a plinth by a solemn procession of guards, curators and officials.
Having never heard of the Portland Vase, and knowing nothing of its history, I was curious about the object that had been brought into the room with such ceremony.
Being an American, I walked over to get a better look, ending up about three feet away. The vase was not yet enclosed in protective glass, and was truly beautiful. Its guards were not prepared for the sudden appearance of this much-too-close visitor, and froze. Could it happen again? Time stood still.
Surprisingly, no one tackled me or tried in any way to move me away from the venerated object.
After a minute or two, I finished my inspection, rejoined Mimi and we moved on.
Special thanks to restoration site sylcreate.com for their article “A restoration 144 years in the making – how the Portland Vase was restored to its Roman glory”
After I left my first after-school “real” job at Kingsway because they expected us to come in on Sundays to clean the store, I got a job at the Mega Foods in Glen Ridge, where I was again grocery clerk , shelf stocker and sometime cashier.
I eventually gravitated to a job I’ll call “cellar man”, for lack of a better name. I listed grocery items that needed restocking, pulled the corresponding boxes out of the stacks, price-stamped them, and put the box on the conveyor belt leading back upstairs. Simple-minded, predictable and repeatable. Working without any immediate supervision, uninterrupted and alone with my thoughts, that cellar job turned out to be good practice for my later career of programming computers.
Not that I was totally alone down there. The conveyor belt rose from a spot only a few feet from the ladies’ room, so I often got the chance to see and kid around with the cashiers. In particular I remember flirting with Myrtle
Hmm, did anybody else in the history of the world ever type in those exact three semi-rhyming words? Let’s ask Google… …dang, I am disappointed, someone has, “About 1,960 results (0.75 seconds)”. Tom, best friend of “The Great Gatsby”, has been “flirting with Myrtle”, the wife of the owner of the garage halfway between Gatsby’s place and New York City. It’s also something Harry Potter does in chapter 19 of the fanfiction “Harry Potter and the Daywalker”. It all goes to show there’s nothing new under the sun.
But I digress – back to the real Myrtle. She was 29, shy, petite and sexy in her coarse cotton wraparound company smock. She really knew how to hold a man’s attention. On the downside, she was married and about 10 years older than I, so nothing ever came of our talks except the pleasure of flirting.
There were other temptations associated with being cellar man. Who has not wanted to sample those fancy jarred pickles and olives on display? In the privacy of my cellar, I did just that, popping one or two vacuum seals every day, maybe unscrewing a maraschino-cherry lid as well. As far as I know, no customer ever complained. Kids, if you buy a jar of something and the lid doesn’t pop when you open it, take it back. It probably won’t kill you, but why find out?
Relatedly, on my earlier, Kingsway job, Tuesdays were a special day for us part-time clerks. It was the store manager’s day off, and assistant manager Freddy went to class in the afternoon. On a typical Tuesday afternoon, we’d destroy one or two sheet cakes and several large bottles of soda. It was like being invited to a birthday party every week.
JustRite self-inking price marker, amazon.com
There were no scan codes then, so every item had to be hand-stamped with the price. Like any job, no matter how menial, stamping prices on groceries can be interesting and fun if you make it a challenge. For example, a case of single rolls of toilet paper contains 100 rolls, in five tiers of 20 rolls, 5 by 4. Sounds like it would take a long time to stamp, right? Ha, not the way I did it!
Upstairs is the bottle-return station, where a cashier counts customers’ empty, usually dirty, glass bottles and refunds their deposit money, two cents for small bottles and five cents for large. (A Seinfeld episode touches on these values.) There’s a sort of vertical conveyor belt with buckets big enough to hold two or three bottles lying down. The cashier holds down a button and the buckets head for the cellar, where they invert and their contents clank into a sawdust-padded carousel. Not every bottle survives the trip in one piece.
Emptying the carousel involves picking through the sawdust and sorting the bottles into crates by brand and size. Nobody in their right mind wants to do that, not even wearing gloves, so management assigns each part-timer a turn at it. Part-timers are expendable and band-aids are available. Only rarely does anyone need to go get stitches.
Our sister store in East Orange had a fire, with much water damage. After the insurance adjusters left, one of the Mega Foods executives apparently decided that the damaged stock in the cellar was still saleable and could go back on the shelves, likely double-dipping the insurance settlement. The remains were trucked over to Glen Ridge and heaped up in my cellar. Although there are companies that do fire remediation for a living, yours truly was assigned the task of cleaning up those soggy piles and getting the goods back on the shelves.
The boxes were soaked and falling apart, the goods inside were wet, and everything stank of smoke. For two days, I made an honest job of cleaning up some of it, but it was hopeless. There was just too much; it was enormous and depressing. I called in sick for a few days, then quit. Hmm, I wonder if Mom could get me an introduction to one of the trade unions like she did for my brother?
Like Tony Soprano’s mother Livia, I read the newspaper obituaries every day. I use a method that saves me some time, because I’m not going to read every one. Referring to the columns in the box at the top of the page, and working from right to left, here’s my method.
The “Arrangements” column lists the funeral homes. I don’t want anyone to die ever, but there’s one small funeral home I sort of root for. I like to see it listed once in a while because it means they’re still in business. They’ve done a nice job handling the arrangements for some of my close friends and family members, and it’s good to know they’re still there.
I scan the “Age” column next. It’s sad to see young people listed. If they are under, say, 30, it’s extra sad. I read these to get an idea of how they died. Sometimes it takes some reading between the lines; dying at home is a clue. It seems to me that over the last two or three years there are far fewer overdose deaths, so kids are getting the news.
Next, I scan the “Name” column – no relatives or close friends, so that’s good. Hmm, that one sounds familiar. Let me think.
friend of a friend?
somebody I know from the neighborhood?
that guy from work?
the lady who runs that store?
somebody from grade school?
Finally, I scan the actual obituary pages, but I don’t read every one. If you want people to read yours, put a picture, or have a weird name. For ladies, the photo from your high school yearbook or wearing your WAC cap is nice. For men, the one in your class A uniform, or the one holding up that prize-winning fish. Know that you were loved, and will be thought of every day.
Three unrelated things I’ve seen that people seem reluctant to believe when I tell about them. Your mileage may vary.
As a child, I saw two or maybe three Civil War veterans riding in the back seat of a convertible in a patriotic parade in Bloomfield, probably on Decoration Day (now Memorial Day) 1943. I remember because I came down with measles that same day and threw up across my mother’s chenille bedspread.
I have always enjoyed watching faith healers such as Jimmy Swaggart and other noisy, lovable fakes. In the 1960s, at nine o’clock on Sunday nights on one of the local channels in Newark, there was a black preacher who practiced Faith Dentistry, although not by that name. He did the standard laying-on-of-hands, fall-backward-into-the-catchers, send-me-the-money show, but he also had testimony from those who had been cured of dental afflictions.
“…and when I woke up the next morning, my cavities was filled!” “What were thy filled with?” “They was filled with… SILVER!”
Google is no help tracking down this preacher or his show, so good luck to you and keep me posted.
One winter day in the early 1960s at about seven o’clock in the morning I was sitting in a bar in Dover (the Dover in Morris County) New Jersey. Don’t judge me, I was trying to stay warm until my route customer next door opened, and you can’t just walk into a business and not buy anything. Anyway, the TV news came on, and one of the first stories was about a huge explosion in Russia, much damage, thought to be a meteor strike. (I was guessing nuke accident.) Nothing about it in any of the newspapers next day, no follow-up on TV, nothing on Google now. Mysteries abound.
