Tag: scenes from my childhood

  • The Price of Today’s Medicine Bag

    I wasted my time reading about bags this morning, because I get the Review-a-Day from Powells.com and today’s review was fashion writer Lynn Yaeger, of the Village Voice, on three different books on handbag style. She writes: Forty years ago — even 30 — there was no such thing as a “hot” bag. You had…

  • That sound you hear is millions and millions of cribs rolling over pearl-encrusted streets toward heaven

    Well, aren’t we all going to rest easier about all those little babies, stretching back to the dawn of humankind, which died before benefit of sprinkled baptism? Rome has decided that they all aren’t gurgling in Limbo cribs, eyes attempting to focus on the restrained delights of a distant heaven dangling from a mobile just…

  • Climbing trees

    One of H.o.p.’s cousins has a tree house, as does PBS’ Arthur, and H.o.p. has decided he wants one. He has just done a sketch of a tree house, “It has an art gallery, there, and a play room.” At first I thought it was only intended to be an imaginary tree house but no,…

  • Pot pies, Patriot Act, and the myth of TV dinners

    See the above pic? It’s from some Raleigh North Carolina exhibit, dated 1952 and it is testament to two things. First, it testifies to the fact that people were already eating TV dinners before they came in foil trays. Second, collapsible TV trays existed before foil-packed TV dinners. Had the picture been taken a year…

  • No other purpose but for the memory book

    Ok. No one is going to be interested in this post except for a very small group of people who attended Jason Lee school in Richland, Washington in 4th grade in 1966-1967. And chances are perhaps not even they would be interested. And chances are zero that any of that small group of people who…

  • For Tri-City, Washington State People – Pancake House 1967

    Everyone else can say, “What do I care about an old pancake house!” and move along. This is the pancake house on George Washington Highway, 1967, in Richland, Washington. I loved that pancake house. We took a picture of it when we were leaving Richland because it was one of the favored places where the…

  • Mid 20th century Kansans who believed in Evolution

    Here they are. Mid 20th century Kansans in Lawrence, believers in evolution. I’m the one with the recessive genes. (For some reason, my son has been begging to see pics of me when I was a baby. So I unearthed the few that I have.)

  • Growing up in the shadow of Mt. Fuji

    Growing up in the shadow of Mt. Fuji

    The UN nuclear arms conference began on Monday. The countdown to midnight has been moved forward again to 7 minutes to midnight, the same setting as when the clock debuted 55 years ago. Picture on right: Hanford B reactor, source of the plutonium for Fatman. Source: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/trinity/articles/part1.html In 1960 I was three years old and…

  • I was back at the bottom of the hill, it was night, and I had started my walk up it

    Wednesday a.m. I was still stressing over CSS when from the other room came ooo, nice tingly tinkly xylophone on PBS Kids. Early millennium gateway to jazz of yesteryear. For the second time in two days I felt briefly upbeat. And then PBS took my new happy theme music away and returned to the Arthur…