Category Archives: memoir

Unplugged

16 Saturday Mar 2019

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I spent the morning attempting to unplug from my Smartphone, television, and the cyberworld. Sleeping helped. Otherwise, no luck. I think it is a matter of discipline. What works against me is that so many of the activities that satisfy me come from the digital world.

After a surprisingly good meal of corned beef and cabbage at Cracker Barrel, I came home and had another nap. The low energy I’m experiencing is attributable to the pollen making its presence felt. Good Old Mother Nature.

I’m doing some trainspotting, watching the Ashland Virtual Railfan LLC Channel on You TUBE.

Early Spring is a great time of year. I have plenty of fond memories, especially when my younger son was little and I was a single parent. His mom’s Healing Touch practitioners group met on Friday nights and we would start our weekends then. Sometimes I would fix homemade macaroni and cheese. Other nights we would pick up a pizza at the restaurant next door to the apartment.

We would watch a Flash Gordon serial or Disney’s Darby O’Gill And The Little People, featuring a yet to make it big Sean Connery. This was in the Dark Age of VHS on videocassette players. Remember? He would fall asleep in my bed. The days when my children always wanted me around them were the best.

My point is that only twenty years ago, the digital incursion into daily life was smaller than it is now. Yet we considered ourselves highly advanced and sophisticated. And we were.

Now I have to check my Smartphone regularly. I am writing this post on the same phone. I’m sure that Aristotle, were he alive today, would be fully engaged with this digital universe. So maybe I will just enjoy the modernity.

Madeleines. Ice Cream.

26 Thursday Jul 2018

Posted by in memoir, Summer

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The Bottle In Question

OK, most everybody with any reading experience has at least heard of the start of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance Of Things Past (A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu), wherein the protagonist bites into a madeleine and the taste of the little cake brings back a flood of memories. Well last night I bought a carton of ice cream at Publix and had a similar experience. The flavor was maple walnut. It was full fat ice cream. (These days admitting you like full fat ice cream is like admitting you enjoy unprotected sex with total strangers. You have self- identified as a risk taker.)

I remember from my childhood, where the family, all six of us, would pile into the car on a hot summer night, drive with the windows down, go get ice cream cones, and then cruise around, looking at stuff. One particular night, Daddy took us to the Curles Neck Dairy Bar, a lunch counter/ ice cream shop that sold their own ice cream It was a local dairy, that had their own farm in Eastern Henrico County (Charles City County, maybe?). Curles Neck denotes one of several bends in the James River. Local dairies were in business then. I ordered a maple walnut cone one night. Then we rode in the 1953 Nash Ambassador Super to Byrd Park, where colored lights shone on the fountain in the Fountain Lake. Quite lovely. I remember the orange colored light on the fountain most distinctly.

This was the great era of neon. Cities, like Richmond, were filled with fantastic signs. One Chinese restaurant, Joy Garden, had a neon sign evocative of an oriental lantern. Gorgeous. The sign was more memorable than the food. The cookie maker, FFV, had its letters illuminated on a water tank, on the roof of its now defunct factory, re-purposed to loft apartments. There was a billiard parlor,the Triple Triangle, that had neon billiard balls racked-up in the triangle Every burger joint had neon tubing outlining their roof, or part of it, at least, in red or blue or green. It was an illuminated night, reflective of an optimism and pride in the businesses of the community.

There are vestiges still. The flavorings and spice maker here in Richmond, The C.F. Sauer Company, has an animated sign featuring a mustachioed chef in a chef’s hat sampling something, as a string of bulbs light up. The night was a show. When I think of illumination these days, I think sodium vapor lights, making the community a little safer from thieves and predators lurking in the dark.

Today, I have a milk bottle from Curles Neck Dairy. I use it to fill the reservoir of my coffee maker. It holds a quart of water. and I can use eight tablespoons of ground coffee to make four eight-ounce cups of coffee with the water poured from the milk bottle. Kinda cool, I think. It’s a memory, or a bite of a madeleine, every day.

Natty Boh: A Memory

26 Friday Jan 2018

Posted by in alcoholism, Baltimore, memoir

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(I do not own the copyright to this image. The folks at Pabst Brewing do. I am not using the image for commercial gain and hope they understand.)

That cartoon image of the one-eyed chap with the handle bar moustache is an image from my childhood. Way back in the 1950’s there was broadcast on local television here in Richmond, a show called Strikes ‘N’ Spares. Its subject was bowling, duckpin bowling. Most of y’all don’t know what duckpin bowling is. The pins are smaller. The ball is smaller, fitting in your hand, about the size of the ball used in bocce. The bowler has three rolls per frame, rather than the two of ten pin.

The show originated from Baltimore, just up Rte 301, I-95. or the railroad tracks, where duckpin was, and still is, popular. The game is loads of fun. It was the first bowling game I played. We played it on Fridays in Freshman Physical Education at Willow Bowl just west of my high school. They came and picked us up on an old school bus, repainted baby blue, from the old school bus yellow. WILLOW BOWL was printed on the side where the old school district legend once was emblazoned.

The sponsor of said show was National Bohemian Beer, known colloquially as Natty Boh. This was a strong, Baltimore-brewed brand, popular in the Richmond market as well as Baltimore. As time ground on, Budweiser, Miller, and, at one point, Schlitz, took away market share from local brands like National Bohemian. The financially weaker local brands disappeared or faded into the background, becoming minor players in the beer market.

To this day, I can sing the National Beer jingle. I’ve pulled the cartoon commercial up on YouTube. Still has that funky naive charm that Fifties commercials possessed. Whether this advertising subtly seduced me into the drinking life, I can’t say. But they did portray beer as an innocent enough beverage.

Back then, we had no admonitions to enjoy beer “responsibly”. In Virginia, the Baptists and Methodists still had enormous cultural sway. They set the tone. Drinking was not cool. There weren’t bars selling hard liquor by the drink till the late 1960’s. A different world it was.

Waking At Night

27 Wednesday Dec 2017

Posted by in Bloggers, memoir, Old Cameras

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I get up at night for many reasons, a full bladder, upset stomach, too hot in the bedroom, to name a few. Then there is the sheer boredom that is trying to sleep. 

So I head to the bathroom, urinate, go downstairs for a glass of seltzer to settle my stomach.  I read a bit of a butch lesbian pornographic/erotic love story that is completely engaging, look at some Tumblrs that I follow and discover a new one about French photographer Robert Doisneau. Suddenly I remember my promise to get my conventional 35mm SLR Pentax K1000 up and running again.

I remember a time 35 years ago when I first got it. I discovered the magic of 32 ASA black and white film. I started photographing old derelict buildings on two lane country roads in Lunenburg County, Virginia, tobacco curing sheds, abandoned barns, stores long gone bust, What happened to those pictures? There was the property settlement of that particular divorce. Did I get them out of the house? If so, where are they here? I fancied myself a photographer, dreaming of being one, embarrassed that my pictures were perhaps too imitative of the photographers I admired, Weston, to name one. 

Time to get back to dreaming with my hands. A Baptist preacher once told me “Prayers work when they have feet.” He was a pretty smart guy.

Friday And Fish Sticks

20 Friday Oct 2017

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I had a tomato caprese panini (or is that panino?, singular?) for lunch, with a bowl of minestrone. I do the abstain from meat on Friday penance most weeks. It reminds me of my childhood. I wasn’t raised Catholic but the public school I attended always had fish sticks on Fridays. They were served with boiled potatoes  sprinkled with dried parsley, boiled cabbage, and corn bread. I still like fish sticks. Until now, that has been one of my darkest secrets. Now you know.

It is a quiet day on the trainspotting front. The trains have been rolling through Ashland more or less on time. Right now, I’m waiting for the Northbound Carolinian #80 to pass through. It is about 15 minutes late. The leaves are just beginning to turn, but it is hardly dramatic. Here comes #80 Northbound just as a southbound freight, hauling intermodal containers, passes on the other track. This is like having a model train layout.

Looking at the box cars covered with graffiti, I often wonder if there would be less graffiti on freight cars, if there were more funding for the arts in public schools. Or would we simply have better trained graffiti artists?  As President Obama once said, “That question is a little above my pay grade.” (To answer, that is).

I had a slightly longer swim last night, 3500 meters, in a pool slightly warmer, than the temperature in my regular pool. I will be leaving in a short while to do my swim for the day.

The quiet of our home and neighbourhood during the day is most soothing.  I can hear a few insects chirping and the noise of the compressor on the fridge.

MrsCorC?  is working a late shift so dinner is just for me tonight. I could go buy some fish sticks. Maybe I will.

Memory Chain Reaction

19 Friday May 2017

Posted by in Family, food, memoir, Suburbia

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1953 Nash Ambassador

It is the 1950’s, a Friday night, and we need to go grocery shopping.  We have one car, a 1953 Nash Ambassador Super, black body with a red top, Continental wheel, straight 6 engine, three on the tree, and overdrive. A righteous car. We all pile in the car, Dad, me, my elder brother in the front, Mama, my sister, my younger brother in the back.  That’s the we way we did riding in the car. Mother did not drive. We had just one car anyway.

We went to the A&P. Some people went to the Safeway; some people shopped at the Colonial Store; some went to Siegel’s (run by brothers Hip and Charlie). There were other local independent supermarkets and superettes (so asserted Richfood, the local buyers’ co-op).  But we went to the A&P.  To a child’s mind, this was almost like our religious affiliation. We were Presbyterians on Sunday who shopped at the A&P on Friday and we all rode in the same car to go to both church and store.  “God’s in His Heaven, all’s right with the world.” 

We would shop.  Dad preferred Bokar Coffee, available only at A&P.  That’s probably why we went. Dad was as serious about his coffee as he was about this country, the Marine Corps, the Presbyterian Church and the Republican Party.  Coffee was serious business in his family. His father (Pop) called it “Arbuckles”. The first coffee I ever tasted was what Pop gave to me from a spoon, with cream.  Still the best coffee I ever tasted.

The A&P was on Meadowbridge Road in Highland Park, near a fire station.  The neighborhood was transitioning from all-white to all-black.   Next to the A&P was a High’s Ice Cream Store. It was a local chain, that had chrome steel swivel stools at the counters.  They sold ice cream at five cents a scoop. The single scoop cone had a pointy end. Sometimes we would be mean to my sister and bite the tip off her cone. (I think she forgave us for this. At least I hope so.)  The High’s Stores were staffed by these little old ladies who wore pale pastel-green dresses (like the old fashioned nurses’ uniforms) and hairnets, white hairnets.  As drug addiction grew in the Richmond area, the junkies would rob the High’s Stores to get the money for a fix..  Eventually the High’s Stores went out of business and the junkies moved on to the 7-Elevens.

Ice cream was a big deal. On a hot summer night, we would get in the car, ride to High’s, Dairy Queen, Tastee Freez, or the Curles’ Neck Dairy Bar.  When we went to Curles’ Neck, we could get an awesome maple nut ice cream.  Then we would ride down to Byrd Park and watch the illuminated fountain in the Fountain Lake.  It was fun.  It was free. My Dad, who worked between his civilian job and his Marine Reserve duty almost constantly, loved this time with his children.  We loved this time with him.

In retrospect, all of these simple pleasures were living on borrowed time.  What destroyed them was affluence and the advertisers who promoted bigger and better versions of fun.  So now we go to Disney World or Busch Gardens or Kings Dominion, for better or worse.

Remembrance Of Things Past

19 Friday May 2017

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Two years ago, my elder son decided to take on clearing out my late brother’s house.  My brother was a hoarder. We found many artifacts from the not too distant American past. 

Does anyone remember seeing this on a can at the grocery store?  It brings back the whole shopping experience before the advent of the barcode reader. The clerk would key-in the prices manually into  

the cash register. It would makes this noise from all the little gears and wheels turning.  It was a different time.

Curiosity

14 Tuesday Feb 2017

Posted by in memoir, Sexual Identity, Suburbia

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Adult Content

Way back in the early Seventies, a movie was released from Sweden entitled  I Am Curious- Yellow.  Shortly thereafter came its sequel, I Am Curious-Blue. Blue and yellow are the colors in the Swedish flag. Get it? The curiosity centered around sex, naked people having intercourse.  I remember going to the Rose Bowl Drive-in to see it. The Rose Bowl had an incredibly cool sign, red neon roses. The sign was the most memorable aspect of every excursion to the The Rose Bowl.  Watching this “fine” Swedish import was no exception. Viewing Porn was just beginning to go mainstream in the Seventies, for better or for worse.  Visual, cinematic pornography is now ubiquitous.  But in the Seventies, you had to go out of your way to see porn. It was an excursion into some seedy, sketchy places.  Porn still existed on the periphery and  The Rose Bowl sat on that edge.

The Rose Bowl was on Rte 1, the “Number One Highway”, as it was known then.  Near it was the Wigwam Motel, a tourist court of small one room cabins, spaced in a semi-circle around a larger building that served as office and restaurant.  There was a wooden representation of a “tipi”,  that comprised the roof. Hence the name “wigwam” could be justified. Further up Rte 1 was the Jamaica Country Club, a swimming pool for African-Americans in the days of segregation.  Simply put, it was a different world. The Rose Bowl is gone, as is The Wigwam. The Jamaica Country Club remains, at least physically, if not as a business. The area is giving way to suburban commercial encroachment, a Sonic Drive-in, Taco Bell,  Arby’s, several mini-storage places, antique shops galore.

There were other venues for porn back then. A fraternity house would acquire some “stag” films and show them to male collegians, for a fee. They were black and white, silent films with various sex acts (never sexual activity between males, however) depicted. The college boys (yes definitely boys!) would watch and make comments, predictably as juvenile, immature and sexist as the films, location and  context would inspire. I watched, because I was curious. Here was sex depicted, mysterious, daunting, powerful.  The filmmakers were not Henry Millers or Anais Nins or Joyces.  There was no thought to “art” in these grubby, grainy shorts.  Yet they were, in their way, art. The films were forgettable, except for one which featured two women who were having penetrative sex with a double headed dildo.  It must be said that the performers were not silicon- enhanced “stars”, but rather ordinary women, not particularly attractive, not ugly either.

The main location for “X-rated ” films in Richmond in the 70’s and 80’s was a movie house near  Virginia Commonwealth University called the Lee Art Theater, later called the Lee “X” Theater.  The films were from Essex or Caballero and starred Seka, Vanessa del Rio, John Holmes, John Leslie, the usual suspects. I remember going on slow business afternoons, the theater incredibly dark, the smell of Pine-Sol in the air. Occasionally there were “strippers”, usually female porn stars, like Vanessa del Rio, Annie Sprenkle, and Juliet Anderson, aka “Aunt Peg”. I vaguely recall Vanessa being busted for cocaine possession during her visit to Richmond, but I could be mistaken.  She took off her costume to the song She’s A Latin From Manhattan.   Gathering up the pieces of her freshly discarded outfit was “Dirt Woman”, a transgendered individual, notable for his obesity and a  crude similarity to the late Divine (aka Harris Glen Milstead), the John Waters “superstar”.  He did this for all the travelling performers. Annie Sprenkle did her show against a back drop of slides, one of which featured a Renault Le Car.  She was working on her doctorate at this time. The announcer mispronounced her name, calling her Annie “Sprinkles”.  When Juliet Anderson appeared, she stripped down, put on some kind of cover-up, then sat down for a Q & A with the audience. She did ask that the audience members not smoke.  She had a second hand smoke issue.  She shared that the porn business was rough; women had to buy their own underwear. I asked her if her parents knew she was in the adult film business. She said they did.  All in all,  she was representative of everybody’s sexually liberated individual living in San Francisco.  This was before AIDS, before porn was shot direct to video; when adult films were still marginal.  Eventually VCU bought the building and uses it for something other than showing sleazy movies.

With the advent of the VCR, “Adult” cable channels and finally the internet, porn went mainstream and arguably ubiquitous.  Now I have seen it all. I am no longer compelled by a perverse curiosity.  Yet I still yearn for the erotic, for love expressed through sexuality.  The sexual drama lives, as it always has, between my ears.

Catch Up and Cursive

07 Wednesday Sep 2016

Posted by in Depression, Exercise/ Fitness, memoir

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Well it’s been a while. I’d like to say exciting things have happened but mostly I haven’t had the privacy I need to write.  Mrs CorC? has been home with holidays and the like.

The Y had its annual pool maintenance and cleaning so swimming opportunities were limited.  Couple this with some attitude about what I think optimal swim conditions should be and the result is no swimming.  I’m finally working my way back.

Am I the only person out there who has this baseline of sadness, like it’s my factory default setting?  When I picture my mother, her face is always sad. She was the archetypal depressive in my life.  My life is the legacy of her sadness. I know. It’s crazy.  But making it go away ain’t easy.

On the lighter side, my latest obsession is Chinese fountain pens.  Jin Hao is a Chinese pen manufacturer and they are selling their fine products dirt cheap on Amazon and Wish. What bites you in the butt, price-wise, is the ink.  A bottle of Sheaffer Scrip runs $8-9 a bottle. Grant you, a bottle may last forever; it just seems like a lot.

The cool thing about fountain pens is the fun they bring to cursive writing.  It is as if the ideas flow from my brain, down my arm, to my hand, then through my hand to the pen to where the ink puts that idea into words on the paper.  Erotic? Maybe. Sensual? Definitely.  My journal is filling up.

Writing in cursive is very satisfying and, at the same time, daunting for me.  I know I am not alone. I am left-handed. When cursive was introduced into the Third Grade curriculum, it was traumatic, at least to Eight Year Old Me.  Those lessons taught me that I  was different  and that maybe something was wrong with me.  I should have paid more attention to Sandy Koufax, I guess.  My parents, Thank God, never tried to change me to a righty.

When we were kids, the cool item was the cartridge pen.  It was a fountain pen that delivered ink from a plastic cartridge, rather than a refillable ink reservoir. I can imagine, today, a bunch of Third Graders trying to fill ink reservoirs, with spilled ink and ink blots making for a myriad of Rohrschachs all across America.  The cool color was peacock blue.  Every kid had a peacock blue Sheaffer cartridge pen.

Dorothy and I will hit the Y about 1:30. I am looking forward to it. There are some forms the disability people said they didn’t get that I sent them. So I have to re-fax them. Mrs CorC? is working in Williamsburg so dinner is up in the air as to what I fix, if anything. That’s my day.

Flashback To 1979, Formerly Titled Saint-Saens Flashback

21 Thursday Jul 2016

Posted by in Classical Music, food, memoir, seduction

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The Compact Disc set arrived yesterday. I have always been a fan of the Saint-Saens Piano Concerti from the time I first heard them back in 1979.  However, until I put the first of the discs in the player yesterday afternoon, and heard the french horns open the Concerto #1 with the orchestral response, I didn’t realize how deeply this music had affected me.

You see, it was the background music of an affair, of a romance that morphed into a marriage.    I don’t know the precisely first time I heard them. The pianist on that first recording , on vinyl, of course, was Aldo Ciccolini,  a great interpreter of Saint-Saens.  What I remember was a dinner at her house. There were grilled chicken breasts, and a salad with slivered almonds and mandarin oranges on romaine, tossed with olive oil, lemon juice and parmesan cheese. Rice? Perhaps. Memory goes in and out. But there was wine, dry white wine, that generic “Chablis” that came in a three liter jug. She was very genteel and tastefully decanted that dreadful swill into a lovely decanter with a lovely stopper, etched glass at the base with a solid glass sphere atop it. The dinner and the music were pleasant and cordial. We talked of our pasts. I came with the baggage of a broken marriage, she with a live-in relationship that did not end well. We drank more wine. We were not yet lovers.

To reciprocate her invitation, I invited her to dinner at my apartment. I fixed the quiche Lorraine  I learned to make from The Joy of Cooking.  We had a pleasant dinner, although the news that day featured a plane crash and an execution. We talked some more. Then we made love for the first time. I remember the skirt she wore, a pale blue skirt with flowers on it, in a very light material and it draped beautifully from her full hips. She proudly told me later that she had a “black lady’s ass”. She did.

We went on trips together in her blue 1970 Olds F-85. with a cassette player. The pirated cassettes of the Concerti  went with us. We drove to Highlands, North Carolina to see a friend of hers. A great trip. Sex. Wine. Pot. Music, Saint-Saens.  A few weeks later we drove to Utica, New York where she interviewed for a college teaching position. By then we were deeply in love. I was ready to quit my job and follow her to Utica if she were hired. And again we listened to Saint-Saens in the blue Olds as we explored the countryside of upstate New York, towns like New Hartford  that featured a green town common reminiscent of Norman Rockwell.  We went to Cooperstown to the Baseball Hall of Fame, where we both concurred that one old baseball glove from the 1930’s looks like any other old baseball glove from the 1930’s. We went to the Oneida Community, where John Humphrey Noyes, in 1848, founded the commune that would spawn the flatware manufacturer and Noyes would experiment with a group marriage, what we would consider polyamory today. Plus ca Change… eh?  More Concerti and the  Septet in E Flat, Op. 85, filler on the album, but a perfect gem in its own right.

The music played on  that summer. We discovered we both loved sailing.  One Sunday night, after a day on the water, we made love on her green printed sheets that featured sailboats and wooded islands, evocative of Maine, I guess. That night, I proposed. She accepted. We smoked more marijuana, listened to Paul McCartney sing  Maybe I’m Amazed, made love some more.

Maybe it should have stopped there. Maybe I would have grown up sooner, quit drinking sooner, stopped using sex as if it were another drug sooner,  faced my demons sooner. Maybe there would not have been the penultimate nightmare of divorce, the ultimate nightmare of her untimely and secretive death. Mixed in with all that pain and all that folly was all that love and hedonism and passion. That’s right, our deepest yearnings.