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Showing posts from April, 2017

Places Gone Places Remembered

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I live in a small community that's constantly changing.  Yes, some of the change can be filed under gentrification, but a good deal of it is subject to the changing social, economic, and technological shifts occurring in this early part of the 21st Century. Old businesses, like the outdated means of communication and means of purchasing goods and services are dropping by the wayside.  Their replacements are not always progressive, but they are hard to ignore.  Just the other day I saw an older woman write a check to pay for groceries.  In an age when a phone app or the swipe of a plastic card is commonly used to buy a cup of coffee, this seemed like such an anomaly.  I half expected the cashier to take the check and ask, What's this?' Maybe that's a little extreme, but rest assured, that day is coming. We do so many things interactively with our phones and computers.  Our phones are our computers now, aren't they? At this point in my life, I've made some dec

Portable

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The first time I went to Disneyland--the Disneyland in Southern California-- I was about 9 years old.  I vividly recall sitting with my aunt on a horse drawn streetcar that took visitors from the front of the park up Main Street.  Back then, it was a re-creation of a turn of the century (20th Century) Main St. with what we loosely called "old fashioned" stores with cracker barrels, penny candy, and proprietors who wore hats and garters on their sleeves.  Disney was always keenly aware of the romanticism of the "good old days" and probably wanted his guests to breathe in the nostalgia as they entered his masterpiece of an amusement park. So, sitting there with my Aunt Dorothy I had an epiphany.  My aunt had lived in aa world where she could actually remember horse drawn streetcars as the state of the art.  Suddenly, she was, at the age of 50, part of the recent past.  As I watched the monorail train go by and eagerly awaited my first look at Tomorrowland, I reali

7th Decade

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Outside my walls,      I welcome measured mystery,           I no longer remember eating the Blues, Drinking ancient sadness,      Just poetry from green lakes,           and gray rain, What now?