Tag Archives: confessional

For the Love of Coca-Cola

14 Friday Mar 2014

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BY JULIE SEYLER AND LOIS DESOCIO

From Julie:
Coca-Cola was 68 years old when I was born, and it’s still here, trying to compete and stay relevant. But, as we all know, everything grows old. Coke’s latest quarterly earnings indicate it may be getting frayed around the edges because for the first time in its 127 year history it is no longer the Number 1 brand. As the population embraces energy drinks and smoothies spiked with whey protein, Coca-Cola has taken a hit.

No doubt, Coke, like all of us right-sided 50 year olds, will figure out how to reinvent itself and age with grace. It’s already taken a Botox injection with its partnership of Green Mountain Coffee. So no doubt Coke will be around for a while, but it does make me wonder: will it still be in the American tapestry of familiar icons in 2114?

Maybe the revolution against sugary drinks will have been so successful that the old timers (i.e. today’s one year olds) will be reminiscing about a soft drink they heard about called Coca-Cola. Farfetched, but not unimaginable, because things always change and nothing is forever.

___________________

From Lois:
I never drank the stuff, but so many things went better with coke – movies, music … traffic circles. The brand managed to bottle more than just fizz and syrup, and for me, it was the visuals that came with Coca-Cola that remain a steadfast reflection of some of the times of my life.

Growing up, the Coca-Cola Bottling Plant was a beacon on the Asbury Park Circle. It was where Route 66 met Route 35, and when giving directions to anyone who was a novice with the navigation of a New Jersey traffic circle, the building was a landmark; the swirly script of red letters a signpost:

“Go the the right,” or “Go to the left,” of the “Coca-Cola building,” I would say.

Today, the building is still there, but it’s shuttered and an eyesore. Coca-Cola left in 2011, and like the traffic circle that it had decorated for decades, it will most likely, and soon, become a thing of the past.

And then there’s the bottles. And all that they have spawned (coke-bottle glasses and green sea glass for starters). What was, and what remains, one of my very favorite movies, is the 1981 foreign film from South Africa, “The Gods Must Be Crazy,” about a coveted coke bottle and its impact on the human condition. The film’s director, Jamie Uys, decided the coke scenes in the movie should be centered around African Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert. He went on an exhaustive search to find, and eventually film, “the real thing”:

So, while we’re at it, and for old times’ sake, let’s join virtual hands, and sing, in harmony, for the love of Coca-Cola:

The Stuff of My Stuff

12 Wednesday Mar 2014

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BY ANTHONY BUCCINO

Whatever happened to George Carlin’s stuff?

Actually, I don’t care what happened to the entertainer’s stuff. His stuff was crap. My crap is stuff. He would say so himself, except he’s gone, and as an atheist, probably not far. But as for me I’ve been thinking about my stuff as I sit here in my man cave/bunker/warehouse with about 60 of those white storage boxes full of my stuff.

I’m not a pack rat. I’ve been writing for more than 40 years, and I don’t have any notes from before 1971, more or less. So, I’ve got a lot of notes about stuff I wrote about, and probably a lot more notes about stuff I wanted to write about but haven’t done so yet. And boxes of books that I used in my research. And more boxes of books I intend to read when I get some time. I can’t bear to part with any of them.

Some of these boxes I had taken down from the attic where there are just as many boxes as the beams will hold. I was looking for something, and I probably found it, but haven’t gotten around to bringing the boxes back up, yet.

While the boxes were handy, I went through them and discarded all the junk. That eliminated almost two boxes. I filled those two boxes with accumulated knick-knacks, opened playing cards, souvenirs and such, Mom’s swizzle stick collection and such, then labeled them so they are ready to go up to the attic.

I compare these sagging white boxes surrounding me to the various hard drives hooked up, and others standing by my computer. It’s probably a close comparison as to which hold more data. But that’s not what got me thinking about my stuff. A power surge or a burst water pipe would certainly have me moaning for all the lost treasures in my stuff. But, no, that’s not it either.

It’s all about what happens to my stuff when I’m not here anymore to take care of it, to sift through it – looking in just the right box for the right piece of paper, or photo, or book, that I need to somehow complete my thought. With the computer I can put in a word or phrase, and I get rows and rows of documents where that word or phrase appears. With these white boxes and the ones cooling in the attic, the sorting algorithm is in my ever-shrinking pack of grey matter.

When I’m gone, what will become of my stuff? Will my surviving relatives declare my stuff as crap, and send it off to the Happy Hill Recycling Farm? Already, I know someone in whom this collection cluttering the basement incites a near grand mal seizure at the mere thought of dumping all this stuff without my aging muscles to bag, lug and tote to the curb.

The books, in several trips, would go to the local library’s annual used book sale, and those not sold to be refreshed into new books some day. My notes and scraps of ideas? Oh, where will they go without me? I suppose the truth is that if there is no extant published version of what I may have produced from my stuff, online or in print somewhere, the thoughts and background stuff will be surely tossed.

I get it. I have to get rid of my stuff so the next guy has a place for his stuff. But first, he has to get rid of my crap so he’ll have a place for his stuff.

I’ve Come to Be a Man for All Seasons

05 Wednesday Mar 2014

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BY BOB SMITH

Friends of ours from Sydney, Australia visited us recently and, true to form for this miserable winter, it was 30 degrees with intermittent snow showers all day. And they loved it. In Sydney, they explained, it never gets cold enough to snow. In fact, during their warmest months (January and February), the temperature ranges from 66 to 79 degrees Fahrenheit. In the cool months (July being the coldest), the temperature ranges from 46 to 61. So their seasons aren’t differentiated by extreme temperature variations or cold-weather events like snowstorms. As a result, they said, in retrospect, they have a hard time distinguishing one year from another.

So, for example, if a noteworthy event in their lives were to occur on a day when the temperature was 64 degrees, they couldn’t later readily distinguish the season when it happened, because it could as easily have been a cool day in January or a warm day in July. They can’t automatically think back on the day, and recall, as we might, that we were wearing gloves and scarves and heavy leggings, and say “Oh yeah, that would have been last winter, when it was bitterly cold.”

Or remember that the event occurred, or that the happy (or sad) news arrived, just as they were finishing up raking leaves on a crisp fall day. Let’s be thankful for the clear mental marker this season gives us to define this point in our lives. Someday Maria and I may fondly recall this as the hard winter when Simon and Monica from Sydney first came to visit us at the shore, when we shared dinner and a lovely pinot noir at a deserted restaurant on the Asbury Park boardwalk, then went home, and played guitar, and sang until our fingers hurt, and our throats were raw.

Winter descends, plants die, birds flee, and the days grow short – sobering harbingers of mortality. But the dark days blossom into buds on trees, and longer twilights, and spring’s timeless cycle of renewal, followed by a riotous explosion of exuberant life, and activity in summer.

Which, dying too soon, morphs into wistful fall. The wheel is always turning, and with our starkly different seasons, we see tangible evidence of it every day. As my 50s recede into the past, each change of seasons seems a touch more poignant, colored by a greater sense that, indeed, we will each see only a finite number of them. Whether we curse that reality or embrace it, we cannot change it one whit. As this long winter draws to a close (whenever that finally occurs), I vote for embrace.

Knock on Wood: I Have a Tree

25 Tuesday Feb 2014

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New tree

Dead center outside my window.

BY LOIS DESOCIO

Cheers! to the 100-plus-year-old Eisenhower Tree that was removed from its golf course in Augusta, Georgia last week because of damage from a Georgia ice storm.

The old pine held up (and was held together with cables for years) in spite of an attempt by President Dwight D. Eisenhower to have it removed in 1956 because his golf balls often couldn’t find their way around it. The Augusta National Golf Club stood up for the tree, and refused to take it down.

I’ve known a few good trees in my lifetime. I’m currently cheering for the mostly-dead, spindle-topped maple just outside my bedroom window in my new home. For the most part, I’ve always had a tree outside my bedroom window – a mimosa, a weeping willow, an apple blossom – so I expect to see a tree when I first wake up.

This maple is my only tree. At least the only tree close enough to my window to allow me to call it mine.

Having recently moved from property that was hemmed-in by an apple blossom that traversed up three floors and touched a window on each floor, a no-holds-barred, unbridled riot of wisteria that rained purple every spring (and came back full-force after the occasional gardener’s hacking), great big elms, ever-green junipers, and woody pines that held buckets-full of snow on their branches, I am especially grateful that the one tree in the back of my new building happens to be right outside my window. It’s solitary, unexceptional; a misplaced tree that you don’t necessarily feel drawn to look up at from below. Its branches are gangly, and offer no resplendent outreaching pattern. It grows out of a black-topped-and-yellow-lined section of the fire zone of a driveway.

And like the Eisenhower Tree, it’s in the way. It’s pushing on the fence between neighboring buildings. But unlike the powers that be at the Augusta National Golf Club that supported a tree over a president, I fear my tree’s days may be numbered.

I’m especially rooting for my maple because tree-loss is fresh on my mind. Trees were taken down by the new owners of my old house for aesthetic reasons – better curb appeal. Apparently better for them to see the house through the trees, than the trees through the house.Tank Tree

And right before I moved out, I watched my favorite juniper tree (seen here being tree-hugged by its much younger, but no less-doomed buddy) fall victim to a chainsaw because it had rooted itself on top of an old oil tank that had to be removed.

So I will knock on wood that my new tree will remain for as long as I live here. Because from the vantage point of my bedroom window, those gangly branches make for a black and blue sky. And, for the past month, those branches have been “painted” snow-white. Its matte-brown facade is looking downright glossy these days. I applaud it as one would applaud anything that still stands tall, despite physical ravages; devoid of its former sinewy youth and dewy vibrancy.

The Way it Was: ‘Done and Gone’

19 Wednesday Feb 2014

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BY JULIE SEYLER

There are many signs that scream that I have left the left side of 50, or as Rod Serling, would say, I have “entered the Twilight Zone,” the brave new world of “I am no longer young.” I know, because my list of “the way things were” gets longer, and more dated with each passing year.

I was born in a world of rotary phones. By adolescence, the push-button had made its entrance. There was a lot of commotion over its ease and convenience. Done and gone. Quaint artifacts of the olden days.

Telephone directories, those bi-colored books, with white pages for a people search, and yellow pages for a business search, would appear on the doorstep once a year, free of charge. Done and gone. Never to be contemplated again.

While color TVs became ubiquitous in the ’70s, I grew up with a black and white TV. The screen was maybe 24 inches, and there were only about seven stations to choose from. At some point, we got a remote control, but I don’t recall it having a presumed presence in the house.

The NBC peacock used to spread its feathers to announce that the upcoming show would be a color presentation.

Dimes were critical because they were needed to make telephone calls, which meant telephone phone booths appeared on almost every other corner.

The only thing we could imagine piercing were ears- not bellybuttons, noses, cheeks or lips.

It seemed as if only sailors got tattoos.

Dress codes were fought over. We staged protests to be allowed to wear jeans to school.

Age 50 was ancient. It was never going to happen! And now, even 50 is becoming a number in the distant past. How weird and rapid the march of time is, and we know it by how we remember the way it used to be.

From E-Mail to Facebook: Making Contact

18 Tuesday Feb 2014

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BY KENNETH KUNZ

Years ago, after Al Gore ” … took the initiative in creating the Internet,” and we all wondered, having newly acquired our first PC, how we’d ever master that mouse-thingie in trying to navigate the ever-disappearing arrow it supposedly controlled, I became wrapped up in e-mailing folks.

And the “You’ve Got Mail” ping was ALMOST as nice as getting a snail mail letter in simpler times. A negative side effect of the new phenomenon, however, was that there were too many users who kind of hid behind an e-mail, rather than actually speak to a friend, vendor, or client one-to-one via phone. Some of those folks still do.

Nevertheless, I started using e-mail as a viable business tool, slowly replacing my use of the fax machine (hated that irritating sound anyway), but, more importantly, I e-mailed friends and relatives to keep in touch like I had not done previously. I had, indeed, kept close contact with many people over the years, but e-mail let me expand that realm.

I remember e-mailing a cousin, and apologizing for not having stayed in touch as much as I probably should have in the past. Like all of us, life got in the way, and time restraints kept my overall correspondence to a relative minimum. At least that’s my company line
rationalization for the void. My cousin’s response to my apology was that it didn’t matter what we did, or didn’t do, in the past, we ARE keeping in touch now. How sweet of her to say so!

And it was proof positive that no matter what doors we avoided, or went through over the years, we ended up where we are for whatever reason and that, succinctly, is the way it is. “Live each day,” and all those other clichés that all so often become inescapable truisms.

Nowadays, social media has exploded, and I keep in touch with so many people that I heretofore hadn’t on a regular basis. It is a wonderful experience! There are, of course, those inane Facebook posts, tweets, and such. I am surely not a fan of knowing how many reps you did in the gym today (unless you’re recovering from an injury or dealing with an illness), some lame info about a celebrity, a barb aimed at an athlete, or an inappropriate, unsubstantiated, misguided political rant. But those posts that include inspirational thoughts, humorous insights, musical rarities, PSAs, or family photos are priceless. And welcomed.

It is nice to have smiles provided on a daily basis. It is also so cool to just reconnect with people with whom we were close in the past. With contact now rekindled, we share our views and emotions that remain similar, just like they were years ago, despite our separate life journeys. Comforting, I think, to remember why we liked each other in the first place, and that we still possess those same traits, likes and dislikes.

Rather neat, as well, to have actually made new friends in the past few years and be able to converse with them in shared experiences. Always amazes me that we can get close to new people in our respective “advanced ages.” Point is, we really are all in this together.

Our world has become quite small indeed, and we are all now most assuredly citizens of a global village. Constant contact keeps us close, keeps our optimism positive, and our faith strong. It allows us to, vent, kibitz, philosophize, laugh, cry … and share it all with all true friends.

It makes it lovely to be here on the good Earth.

Keep in touch, y’all!

PEACE.

It’s Never Too Late for Activism

17 Monday Feb 2014

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BY FRANK TERRANELLA

I was reading and listening to obituaries of Pete Seeger recently, and noticed something peculiar. In many obituaries, Seeger, who made his living as a musician, was identified as an “activist.”  I wondered what exactly the 94-year-old composer of “Turn, Turn, Turn,” had done to earn him the title “activist.” And is that title meant as praise or damnation?

So I first consulted the dictionary, and found that activist is defined as, “an especially active, vigorous advocate of a cause, especially a political cause.” Since every public cause is a political one, I think that the definition would encompass anyone who is a vigorous advocate of any cause that affects more than a person’s immediate family and friends. So advocating for proper care for your father, who has multiple sclerosis, would not make you an activist. But advocating on behalf of everyone who has the disease would. It’s a lot like the job of “community organizer” that was sneered at an election or two ago.

Seeger’s obituary in The New York Times noted that, “He sang for the labor movement in the 1940s and 1950s, for civil rights marches and anti-Vietnam War rallies in the 1960s, and for environmental and antiwar causes in the 1970s and beyond.”

Clearly, for his active involvement in these causes, Seeger earned the title “activist.”  Seeger cared about others. His motivation was the polar opposite of greed.

But what about the rest of us? Shouldn’t we all be activists? Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young told us, “We can change the world, rearrange the world.”

It was the “Age of Aquarius.” Well, sadly we all know how that turned out. Self-interest trumped community involvement.

In the ‘80s, many embraced George Bush’s “A Thousand Points of Light” – a sort of “separate but equal” approach to community activism that stressed individual action. It was sold as an alternative to group action, particularly group action using community tax money. And what happened? Income inequality, crumbling cities, and two optional wars.

But some people like Pete Seeger, Tom Hayden, Martin Luther King Jr., Cesar Chavez, Al Gore, and even Bob Barker recognized the importance and power of organizing community action. They saw that people working together supercharged their efforts. They didn’t fear government action. They saw that the ultimate community tool was government action. They worked hard to pass civil rights, labor and environmental laws that express the desire of the community for a better world. They all earned the title “activist.”

But is “activist” an honor or an epithet?  I think that depends on which side of the particular cause promoted by the activist you favor. There are certainly activists for both conservative and liberal causes. Frankly, I respect them all because even if I don’t agree with the cause they are promoting, I can respect the fact that they took the time to try to help the community.

As we move toward our “senior” years, we have one last chance to be activists. If we don’t, we face the prospect of an obituary of someone who was shamefully a “passivist.”  And that’s not someone who advocates against war.

How to Host a Murder(er)

13 Thursday Feb 2014

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do we ever really know who someone is?

BY MARGIE RUBIN

Twenty five years ago, I was teaching a group of elementary students with emotional and behavior disorders. Many of these students were bright, but their behavior kept them out of the general education classes. My goal, besides teaching them academics, was to help them learn coping strategies, social skills, and acceptable classroom behaviors. In other words, “how to do school.”  

And the best teachers of acceptable behavior were peers. Which brings me to my dinner with a serial killer. You see, a dedicated special-ed teacher would do just about anything to get his or her students mainstreamed.  The 4th grade teacher, whom I will call CIndy, took an immediate liking to me (mostly because I was pregnant and she had a thing for babies). She offered me a place for my students, and dinner at her house. As I munched on Ritz crackers and Velveeta, my husband bonded with Cindy’s husband (whom I will call George), over their love of carpentry, and the very cool hammer collection he had.  

Dinner was not memorable, but after dinner we were ushered into their velvet-walled  bedroom to watch their cheesy wedding video on the Hornblower yacht. We said our thank-yous, and made our escape as quickly as we could. A year later, I was no longer teaching at that school, but my dear friend had taken over my class, and pretty much begged me to have Cindy and George over to dinner with her and her husband. After all, I was the one with the baby Cindy could oogle over. And think of the mainstreaming opportunities.  

I  acquiesced, and invited everyone over to play “How to Host a Murder” a popular game in the ’90s we had gotten for a gift. I knew things were going to be strange when Cindy showed up at my house in a full-length mink coat. My only other memory of that night was when George was revealed as the murderer in the game.

Ten years later, my husband was reading the Sunday Chronicle, and yelled for me to come quick. On the front page, was a large picture of George. He looked a little older, and fatter, but we both recognized him immediately. The headline said that he was arrested for attempted murder of a prostitute. You see, according to the police, he had raped her, beat her with a hammer and thrown her into San Francisco Bay thinking she was dead. What he didn’t count on was her faking her death to get away. As disturbing as that was, what really did us in was the fact that George was linked to numerous murders of prostitutes spanning 20 years and yes, he had killed all of them with his nifty hammer collection. He got a 375-year sentence, and we got a story to share.

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A (Hopeful) Thumbs-Up for Voltaren

12 Wednesday Feb 2014

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bob thumb

BY BOB SMITH

We’ve had a number of “physical decay” entries in this blog during the past couple of weeks. Not to pile on, but here’s my story:

For the past week, at least three times every day, I’ve taken a couple of grams of a white drug that you lay down in a line on a card. Yeah, you guessed it: I’m doing VOLTAREN.voltaren Although it sounds like the name of a Star Trek villain from the planet Org, it’s innocuous, perfectly legal, and no fun at all. It’s a topical gel whose active ingredient is diclofenac sodium, a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug used to treat sore or inflamed joints and muscles. You rub it into the affected area (the tendons that attach my left thumb to my hand), and it’s supposed to seep in there, and relieve the pain.

This sounds suspiciously like ASPERCREME, or BEN GAY, or any of a dozen other old-fashioned liniments and ointments our grandparents used to use. I distinctly recall, years ago, seeing Maria’s grandmother diligently rubbing ASPERCREME into her gnarled, arthritis-ridden fingers, day after day, and thinking it was a total waste of her time and money. Well, the laugh – and the goopy gel of dubious therapeutic value – is now on me.

The weird thing is, I have no idea how I got tendonitis in the first place. My doctor says it’s common among gamers and others, like compulsive smart-phone users, who constantly repeat, for hours every day, sweeping, scrolling, and clicking motions with that thumb. That’s not me. Somehow, I got the pain without the hours of pleasure of putting Angry Birds through their paces or rapid-firing virtual automatic weapons at endless hordes of baddies.

Worse yet, I don’t even think the gel is working. It takes quite a bit of rubbing and massaging to get it to soak in, and when I’m done I imagine for a few brief moments that the pain seems to fade. But wouldn’t I get that effect from six minutes of massage with regular old hand lotion?

Let’s consider my options if this goop doesn’t do it: There’s acupuncture if I want to go the age-old-but-pooh-pooh’ed-by-modern-medicine approach, or the reportedly instant gratification awaiting me if I let them inject cortisone into the joint. They say the only thing that hurts after a cortisone shot is the spot where they poked you with the needle (and your bank account if it’s not covered), but there’s also the rumor that once you go down the cortisone road, there’s no turning back.

Let’s hope the mighty VOLTAREN does the job. Because if that glorified ASPERCREME doesn’t cut it, my choices are a bunch of little needles that might or might not work, or one bigger needle that almost surely will work but may doom me to a life of ever-less-effective injections. Do I want to be a human pincushion, or just another cortisone junkie?

And they say getting old isn’t any fun. Gotta go now – time to do another two-gram line.

Revisiting Shirley Temple, and a Collective Innocence

05 Wednesday Feb 2014

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bright eyes 2

BY JULIE SEYLER

Between the ages of 7 and 9, I was a Shirley Temple fiend. Come Sunday morning, I could count on curling up in front of the 14″ black and white TV to watch Shirley sing, dance and cry on cue. I knew all of her movies by heart. This was no feat, since they basically followed the same formula. Shirley is either an orphan, or becomes an orphan and is rescued from despair due to her adorable precociousness. I outgrew Shirley, and she outgrew acting and became a United States ambassador to Ghana and Czechoslovakia (when that country still existed).

But the other night I returned to my childhood because TCM was broadcasting “Bright Eyes,” made 80 years ago, in 1934. I’m embarrassed to admit that I was again captivated by Shirley’s charm as she belts out “On the Good Ship Lollipop,” for a bunch of pilots that look like they’re about 40 (but are probably only 20), as a plane taxis back and forth on the runway. The plot in “Bright Eyes” follows the predicable trajectory:

When the movie starts, Shirley’s father, a pilot, is already dead. She understands he “cracked up.” Her mother has found work as a maid with a mean, rich family with a bratty little daughter. On Shirley’s birthday, her mother is run over by a car, and Shirley learns that her mother has “cracked up” also. Of course, the mean rich family wants to turn poor Shirley out on the street, and of course that doesn’t happen. If you want to know how it ends, download the movie, because what really hooked me into watching it all the way through were the little details that highlighted the innocence of 1934.

The movie opens with Shirley hitchhiking to the airport. Yes, there she is sticking out her 5-year-old thumb to get a ride. That scene is so out of whack today, not just because hitchhiking is passé, but because she is without any adult supervision. Just think about a time and place when we felt so safe that the motion picture industry could depict a working mother allowing her daughter to hitch a ride without any fear that it would be accused of promoting parental neglect.

When she arrives at the airport, she marches right onto the runway. No one bats an eye as this tot plants herself on the tarmac to watch pilots do loops in the sky. Would any pilot do a loop-de-loop in the sky today?

Later, when she decides to run away from the mean family, she climbs into the cargo hatch of the plane, and hangs out as the plane soars through the worst storm ever. No one was guarding the gate with orders to remove her shoes, and walk through a metal detector or body scanner. Those devices, invented to protect us from plane bombs and hijackings, were non-existent in those long ago days because the biggest fear in flying was a crack-up, not the notion that someone would want to blow up a plane.

But there was one thing in the movie that was familiar.The featured mode of transportation was an American Airlines plane. Somehow or other, with all the craziness in the airline industry American Airlines, unlike Pan Am and TWA, has managed to stay in the business of transporting passengers and freight through the air since 1934.