Thursday, February 9, 2023

On this day in Middleton WI in 2000: Letter to Mom in Warren PA




Dear Mom, 

Earlier in the week, Andy made an unexpected observation.

“This school year is going by so fast,” he said as he was getting his stuff together one morning. 

I shared Andy’s remark at a meeting this afternoon. Most of the staff present seemed to think it was an unusual utterance. Eve, the children’s librarian, who’s seven or eight years older than I am, said she didn’t really get a sense of time going fast until she was in high school. 

My feelings of time quickly slipping away didn’t occur until after the first semester of my freshman year at college. At the time, and even in retrospect, the fall of 1968 seemed to be a period of my life when I was suspended in time.   I suppose a lot of it had to do with the new experience of living away from home and being in an environment where most of the people I interacted with – my roommates, the people on the shuttle bus between the off-campus apartments where I lived and the UB campus, my classmates that filled the lecture halls, the students milling about in Norton Union – were the same age as I was. It was an insular world where we spent almost all of our time in the company of our peers, which initially was a wonderful, sometimes exhilarating experience. Our campus community, like others then and before and since, did not reflect what was going on in the workaday world.  The best example of this insularity is a vignette from my last semester at UB. 

I remember walking with a friend of mine to the union after a Modern American Literature class on the day after the 1972 Presidential election.  “I can’t believe that McGovern lost,” Sue bemoaned. “Everybody I know voted for him.”  Fortunately, college life didn’t cause me to become that disconnected with the real world. 


 “I saw something good on the news today,” Eddie informed me as I drove him to school this morning. 

During our morning “rush hour” at home, the kitchen TV is always tuned to NBC’s Today Show.  JoAnna doesn’t like a quiet house in the morning, and the program also serves as a way for the boys to keep up on current events. Every once in awhile, though, I want to take a sledgehammer to the TV screen, like today when Katie Couric – or was it Matt Lauer, this aging brain can’t recall – interviewed a mother and daughter from Littleton, Colorado, for their reactions to an apology offered by a Florida teen who sent threatening email messages to Columbine High School. Give it a rest, I say! Unable to listen to their blather, I instead made disparaging remarks about the mother’s poufy crown of shoulder-length hair. Another interview earlier in the week also had my blood boiling, but I’ve already forgotten who the focus of my animus was. I must be warming up – or is it cooling down? -- for the senior mental fitness challenge.

 “What was that?” I asked, curious to know what caught his attention.   

“There’s a new airplane. It has leather seats and TV.” 

“That must be an expensive plane to fly on,” I surmised.  

“It costs five dollars to watch TV,” Eddie said, as if to contradict my statement. 

  let out a whistle, making it sound like I thought that was a hefty expenditure. 

 Again, Eddie seemed to disagree with my response. 

“Five dollars isn’t a lot of money,” he asserted. 

I wouldn’t have thought so when I was Eddie’s age. In 1959, when I was 10 years old, five dollars was a princely sum. I could have inserted a nickel into the pop machine outside of Foreman’s and pulled out a 7-ounce Orange Crush in a bottle of shapely design. I could have spent less than a quarter and walked away with a small bag full of penny candy – fireballs, licorice, malted milk balls, plus a pretzel stick or two from a clear container on top of the glass counter.


Nowadays Andy and Eddie will walk to Walgreen’s and return with a bag of Twizzlers and Sweet Tarts and gum and a few coins in exchange for a five-dollar bill. How times have changed – and then again, how they haven’t. The days of penny candy are long gone, but kids still have a forceful sweet tooth. 

My Benjamin Franklin act has been put on hold. The alarm clock has brought me back to consciousness every morning this week. I listen to the national and local news before getting out of bed and beginning my morning routine. Sometimes I wish I could get away with 4 or 5 hours of sleep a night. I’d get a lot more writing and reading and other personal projects done, although it’s not as if I’m currently unproductive in those areas. 

Have you been watching "Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?"   JoAnna sometimes tunes it in as she pauses from her channel surfing. I enjoy it in small doses. We watched the last 20 minutes of tonight’s show, and I caught 15 minutes of Monday’s installment. I haven’t seen any of the other prime-time game shows. With ABC having hit the motherlode, the other networks are now looking for riches of their own in the same mine. I’m sure this programming phenomenon will very likely be short-lived

I was planning to continue this letter over the weekend but will enclose what I have written so far in your Valentine’s Day card.

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