I WANNA LEARN MORE -- REALLY? -- WHAT? -- HMMM, LEMME SEE...

Of course you do.  So don't we all. But you know what?  I hear this a lot.  I hear it practically every day.  Every day! Now look, it's been a long time since I came to the conclusion that the world is full of people who never threw the pointy hat away when they were let out of the classroom corner.  But I didn't ever think that there would be so many asking me to teach them something that they could learn simply by looking out the kitchen window.
That's only one of the foibles.  What about when someone buys a new gadget and unfolds the little paper that has the directions of how to put the thing to use and still can't get it done?  
"Hey, You, [yes, that's my name] how do I get this thing to work?"
 "Hmmm, lemme see...Oh, right here, slide this little guy over to the right and you're in business."
"Neat-oh! how dz'ya do that?"
"I read the directions."
"I wish I could do that, but I don't understand technical language .  I guess I should learn how to do that."
To which I find myself thinking more than sometimes, 
"Phew, I'm glad I don't have a doctorate!"

Most of the time I hear it from church goers.  "I wanna learn something new."  Oh, that's a good one.  I jump all over this one.  
"Dz'ya go ta church yesterdee?"
"Uh-Huh"
"What did Jesus say to the Pharisees yesterday?"
"Jesus talked to the Pharisees yesterday?"
"Yep, sure did.  You were there right?"
"Yyyeeahhh, I was."
"Looks like you missed an opportunity to learn something new."
End of that conversation.

I don't want to belabor the point too much, but I do have another one that I hear a lot: "I wish I could learn Spanish."
Huh?  Spanish?  Here in Southern California?  Not a chance, not here!  
I hear this so often, that it chokes me every time because I know that the speaker is just making small talk conversation.
People who talk like that don't have a clue of what it takes to learn another language.  Right, Donna?  Right, Kimberly? 

It's an interesting world that we live in.  I won't make it any more interesting for you by telling you that I'd like to learn more math.  Now that, my friends would be pure Stercus Taurorum from the Pisces himself.  Right, Laura?  Laura knows how futile that statement would be since she wasted a ton of time trying to explain "x" to me over her kitchen table some years ago.
So, no, I don't ever say "I want to learn something new."
I just look out the kitchen window and it works all the time. I can prove it...just ask me about the sex lives of hummingbirds.

SLOW FOOD

I received this list of "When I was a young one growing up..." and I decided that the person who generated it had left out some items that are dear to me.  I have written about them here and there in the blogs that I maintain, but I decided that since my brain was already on the train because of the email, that I would send the entire "meal" to you all.

NOTICE:

There are many of you who are reading this who were not born and brought up in the USA.  If you want to share your dearest nostalgia filled memories, send them and we will all enjoy them on this blog.

SLOW FOOD

'Someone asked the other day, 'What was your favorite fast food when you were growing up?'

'We didn't have fast food when I was growing up,'

I informed him.

'All the food was slow.'

'C'mon, seriously. Where did you eat?'

'It was a place called Home,'' I explained. !

'Mom cooked every day and when Dad got home from work, we sat down together at the dining room table, and if I didn't like what she put on my plate I was allowed to sit there until I did like it.'

By this time, the kid was laughing so hard I was afraid he was going to suffer serious internal damage, so I didn't tell him the part about how I had to have permission to leave the table.

But here are some other things I would have told him about my childhood if I figured his system could have handled it :

Some parents NEVER owned their own house, never wore Levis, never set foot on a golf course, never traveled out of the country or had a credit card.

In their later years they had something called a revolving charge card. The card was good only at Sears Roebuck. Or maybe it was Sears & Roebuck.

Either way, there is no Roebuck anymore. Maybe he died.

My parents never drove me to soccer practice. This was mostly because we never had heard of soccer.

I had a bicycle that weighed probably 50 pounds, and only had one speed, (slow)

We didn't have a television in our house until I was 9.

It was, of course, black and white, and the station went off the air at midnight, after playing the national anthem and a poem about God; it came back on the air at about 6 a..m. And there was usually a locally produced news and farm show on, featuring local people.

I was 21 before I tasted my first pizza, it was called 'pizza pie.' When I bit into it, I burned the roof of my mouth and the cheese slid off, swung down, plastered itself against my chin and burned that, too. It's still the best pizza I ever had.

I never had a telephone in my room. The only phone in the house was in the living room and it was on a party line. Before you could dial, you had to listen and make sure some people you didn't know weren't already using the line.

Pizzas were not delivered to our home but milk was.

All newspapers were delivered by boys and all boys delivered newspapers-- I delivered a newspaper, 7 days a week. It cost 7 cents a paper, of which I got to keep 2 cents. I had to get up at6AM every morning.

On Saturday, I had to collect the 49 cents from my customers. My favorite customers were the ones who gave me 50 cents and told me to keep the change. My least favorite customers were the ones who seemed to never be home on collection day.

Movie stars kissed with their mouths shut. At least, they did in the movies. There were no movie ratings because all movies were responsibly produced for everyone to enjoy viewing, without profanity or violence or most anything offensive.

If you grew up in a generation before there was fast food, you may want to share some of these memories with your children or grandchildren

Just don't blame me if they bust a gut laughing.

Growing up isn't what it used to be, is it?

MEMORIES from a friend :

My Dad is cleaning out my grandmother's house (she died in December) and he brought me an old Royal Crown Colabottle. In the bottle top was a stopper with a bunch of holes in it.. I knew immediately what it was, but my daughter had no idea. She thought they had tried to make it a salt shaker or something. I knew it as the bottle that sat on the end of the ironing board to 'sprinkle' clothes with because we didn't have steam irons. Man, I am old ...

I might be older than dirt but those memories are some of the best parts of my life.

Don't forget to pass this along!!

Especially to all your reallyOLD friends

I can see how it might be possible for a man to look down upon the earth and be an atheist, but, I cannot conceive how he could look up into the heavens and say there is no God. - Abraham Lincoln

That's the email.  Since I do not have any REALLY OLD friends I am sending this to all my readers, young and not so young.  

What follows is real life.  I did not make any of this up.  I couldn't...my brothers and sister are watching me! :-)

​My response to the email.

I am not going to forward this before adding my own non anonymous and very real memories about growing up​.  They came to me as I was going down the list above.

I shared a room with my brother.  When boy #3 came along we made room for him.

I was 12 before my parents relented and allowed us to have a radio in our room.  9:00 PM curfew on it. no weekend exceptions except for the Joe Louis /Jersey Joe Walcott fight.

No, it didn't have FM - that wasn't invented yet.

I went to school on the city bus, got there for the 8:00 AM start and didn't get out until 3:30.  

When I or anyone else misbehaved, we got whacked with the ruler.

If you didn't have passing grades, you were held back.

I remember that when I got to be in the 6th grade, at the end of the year, the 6th, 7th graders helped to clean the school to put it in "moth balls" for the Summer.  I was a member of the volunteers who reported one week early to get it out of "moth balls" for the September opening.

Hey, I even remember that the comedians on the radio never got beeped!

I was forbidden to listen to Bob Hope because he was too racy.

I was in 2nd year high school before we got a television. (Now it's been 5 years since we have a television in the house!)

I saw two movies before I was 12, "Dumbo" and "The Song of the South."  Miraculously, both were in Technicolor...Yep, Technicolor...they don't call it that any more.

We had to obey the air raid sirens and shut off all the lights or risk getting a citation from the air raid warden for violating national security.

Every home had a clothes line...the sun dried scent came from God, not out of a box.

If you had a back yard it had a Victory Garden where you worked with your parents to make the garden produce your vegetables.

I played baseball in the summer time.  I walked to the play ground and back home.

I got my first two wheeler bicycle at age 13.  When I got old enough, 15 or 16 I guess, I could pedal my way to the "away" games at fields up to 5 miles away.  (Al, for us that was Woodlawn, Center, and in my case, Fairview.)

I also remember the country going crazy on August 15, the day we were finally not killing nor getting killed any more in World War II.

Talking about that, what ever happened to the "Draft."  

I remember when all airplanes had propellers and all train engines ran on steam.

I'm so old, I remember the way the St. Louis Cardinals beat the Boston Red Sox in the seventh game of the 1946 World Series.  It was an October day, not November.  I remember it like it was yesterday.  But, in fact, at my age, even yesterday is getting pretty fuzzy.

There were only 16 major league teams then.  The Boston Braves were my favorites.  They only played 154 games per season.
My favorite professional ball players were Birdie Tebbetts and Bobby Doerr even though they played for the Red Sox.
Ted Williams was a bum, as far as I was concerned.  We didn't go to Boston often.  It was a nearly three hour drive to cover the 105 miles.
Professional football was not a significant attraction. Boston had a team.  I think it was the Redskins.  As I remember it, they were bad and weren't making any money.

I remember when Dick Tracy had a wrist radio connected to the Chief.  In fact, I remember when "Peanuts" was just being published and "Snoopy" walked on all four legs.

I remember when the daily newspaper went from 15 cents to 25 cents for 6 days and my father stopped delivery he was so mad.  The humorous part of all this is that he could only hold out for one week!

I was 11 years old on the night when our youngest sibling was born and none of us even knew that Mom was in the "family way."

Let me put a final period to this by saying that we old people don't talk about the "Bad Things" we did because we know that it would only make you young people laugh that we could even think that what we did was actually bad.

With memories like that, I can go happily to my eternal rest, so don't "Cry at my Funeral."

THIS WAS DONE WHEN I WAS SUPPOSED TO BE CLEANING HOUSE

ME & "The Voice from the Kitchen"

This is one of those things that crops up on you when you are cleaning house.  You're doing it not because the place is dirty, but because you were told to do it.  So you do it until you get to finding something of great value, like a great picture of the person who ordered to clean up in the first place.  That is the beginning of a great day on the cleaning up circuit.
There are several more of these snap shots in a million places around the house.  This, despite the fact that there must be another million snapshots captured in electronic bits on flash drives, SD chips and in the cloud, that just have to be printed in hard copy so that "I can have an album."  Dream on dearest!  You have so many pictures captured on electronic media that it would take an album the size the Louvre Museum to capture them all in anything more substantial than ions and neurons and isotopes.  I have come to the conclusion that the great blessing of snapshots is that they give me a break when I start to clean house.  I always start in the places where I opine that there is the highest chance of finding interesting old snapshots right here!  Wow, got it, here's one of gran'ma Dion.  Don't believe me, here, take a look ... See, I told you.

Edward - Gran'ma - Ray

There are all kinds of things that you can find when you're cleaning house.  Heck, you can even find pictures of people whom you don't know and maybe never knew.  The worst part about that is that some of them look sneakily like someone whom you SHOULD know.  Now that is a guilt trip sneak attack.  Be careful not to ruin your day.  Here, let me try to do it for you.  I'll start you off with an easy one.

Lea - Ora - Rose
You name the guys

One is Theo and the other one is a guy whose name I have honestly forgotten.  If it comes back to me I'll let you know...I know his surname was Snowman,  O, I got it now, Everett.  See, I told you that was an easy one.  Now you get to guess where he was from and where he ended his days.  Do you know who was married to whom, by name of course, in the picture?
Somewhere in this ocean of faces, there is a Cecile, a Gloria, a Lionel, a Donald, a Mina, a Betty, an Al and a few more besides all the poor anonymous ones who have gone before us even though they have contributed to the shaping of who we are.  In some ways it is a good thing that I don't have some of the elements of the "shaping."  You know, stuff like the suit coats, suspenders, hats, full length dresses and a bunch of other stuff.
Now I know that ther are many of you who don't know these people in particular, but if you are an adult of any age, you know what this is all about.  It is about the human condition.  It is the river of humanity of which we are part.  You have the same mysteries in your lives.  You have similar collections of numerous faces, bodies, poses, geographic puzzles, old cars, funny hats and crazy hair do's.  Sometimes you see a 100 year old picture and you know exactly who the captured face belongs to, only to be disappointed at the five year old picture of your long lost cousin whom you can't recognize because the picture is five years old but the cousin is 75.

All of this tells you that I did not get much house cleaning done.  The Voice from the Kitchen is not going to be happy that I spent my time with photos and then ruined the rest of the day writing this silly blog post.  I can't help but think that I had better keep looking over my shoulder because she's out to get me, 4 SURE!

You want more pictures?  Don't look at me.  Go to your own attic::-)