Tag Archives: Men

Weddings Today: Short on Ceremony, Long on Food Stations

07 Monday Apr 2014

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Frank wedding cake

BY FRANK TERRANELLA

I had an interesting cultural experience recently when I attended a wedding of two friends of my daughter. Since these were not relatives, and in fact were people I hardly knew, I was able to sit back and take a dispassionate look at the state of wedding culture today. Being over 60 gives me the perspective of a parent, and the fact that I still have an unmarried daughter adds some relevance to the matter.

You should know up front that this was an Italian wedding, though not the Italian Football Wedding Pat Cooper spoofed 50 years ago. This was a classy affair in a high-rent-district wedding facility. But years ago, this would have been the site of just the reception after a church wedding. Now, it housed both the wedding and the reception. That’s because many young people no longer want to jump through the hoops required by the Catholic Church to receive the sacrament of matrimony. So they forego the sacramental church wedding and are married by a deacon or justice of the peace. That’s a fundamental change over the past 40 years.

So everyone gathers for the ceremony in a chapel provided by the facility. The ceremony is short and sweet:
Do you take him?
Do you take her?
You’re married!

And of course, the last thing the presider at a wedding always says no matter whether it’s in church or on a beach is, “You may kiss the bride.”
Frank wedding article
So we always have the money shot of the two people kissing just before they head down the aisle.

This time, as I watched the bride and groom kiss, suddenly the words of the Paul Williams song made famous by the Carpenters started playing in my mind, “A kiss for luck and we’re on our way.” The bride and groom bound down the aisle, but no one throws anything anymore. Years ago, people threw rice, and later, the more ecologically-minded moved to birdseed and bubbles. Now we seem to have given up on it altogether. That’s fine with me. Let the cocktail hour begin!

So we all walked over to a nearby hall where the latest wedding innovation was in evidence – stations. Where we once had cocktails at a bar while waiters roamed with hors d’oeuvres, now we have a shellfish station, a meat station, a salad station, a pasta station. At this wedding, there was even a sliders station. I think stations are a big improvement over the old days. In fact, I ate so much at this cocktail hour I would have been happy to proceed directly to the dessert table.

But after an hour of drinks and great food, we headed to yet another room where tables were set up for dinner. We were seated close to the music. The music these days is mostly deejays. All the music is in their computer and so they can please just about every musical taste. I do miss live bands though. They were often mediocre and wedding singers were hit and miss. But every once in a while you got a great band, and that’s when you really appreciated live music. No matter how loud the deejay makes his music, it doesn’t compare with a live guitar, drums or trumpet. I think the convenience of a deejay, and the vast variety of music they can play is helping them drive wedding bands out of business. Anyway, these days I’m stoked when I see that a wedding features a live band.

Despite all the changes in wedding culture over the years, most weddings I have been to recently still feature the obligatory dances with the bride’s father and the groom’s mother. And most also still have a ceremonial cutting of the wedding cake. Although the nonsense with the garter seems to have thankfully faded away.

The finale to a modern wedding is the Venetian Table, which usually features just about every dessert known to man. Here, again, we have stations like the chocolate station, the pastry station, the cake station and the ice cream station. As someone with a gigantic sweet tooth, I give the modern wedding dessert festival two sticky thumbs up. The dessert table brings the wedding festivities to a close for people my age, though younger guests dance until the deejay closes up shop.

We as a society devote a lot of time and money to weddings. In fact, it’s an industry unto itself. But at the end of it, what matters is whether the bride and groom are willing to work at being a team, respect each other and live together in harmony. Everyone who has been married knows how tough it can be at times, but if you work hard, with a little luck, you end up with a life partner. That reminds me of another song. If memory serves me it was written by Carole King. It says, “I know that each of us is all alone in the end, but the trip still seems less dangerous when you’ve got a friend.” And that’s why we get married.

On a Dock, With New Perspective

03 Thursday Apr 2014

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Bob on dock

BY BOB SMITH

It’s funny how time can change your perspective. In 1968 I was a 13-year-old high school freshman just starting to wonder about my place in the world. Although full of energy and enthusiasm, I was also plagued by the usual teenage insecurities. I wore my hair long, and smoked pot, so I could fit in with the nonconformist “hippie” crowd, whose approval I coveted. I cursed the blotches of acne that were starting to bloom on my chin and cheeks, and I worried about being too chubby to be attractive to the girls in my class.

Still, while the insecure teenage-me sought acceptance, and feared failure, at my core, I firmly believed that anyone could succeed if only they worked hard enough. I thought things could never get so bad that you couldn’t find some good in any situation. That life was never hopeless; that dreams never died.

In January of that year, the Otis Redding song, “(Sittin’ On) the Dock of the Bay,” was released, and by March, it had reached the top of the pop charts. Part of the song’s appeal was the tragic story behind it: Redding and five of his bandmates all had died in a plane crash on December 10, 1967, just two days after putting the final touches on the recording. The song has since been covered by many other artists, and it’s been replayed endlessly over the years. In fact, in 1999, BMI declared it the sixth most performed song of the twentieth century, with six million performances.

But in 1968, I hated it. There I was, ready (or so I thought) to embark on the terrifying and wonderful adventure of adulthood, hearing this hit song about a guy who had nothing better to do than ” … sittin’ on the dock of the bay wastin’ time.” It seemed like a woefully misguided ode to indolence, glorifying defeatist behavior that I had been taught to condemn rather than applaud. This song seemed to fly in the face of all my beliefs, and I just couldn’t accept it.

The first verse sums up his day:

Sittin’ in the morning sun.
I’ll be sittin’ when the evening comes.
Watching the ships roll in,
Then I watch them roll away again.

I pictured some bum dozing in a daze of creosote fumes against the greasy piling of a California pier, doing zilch all day long. Oh no – not nothing – he’s listlessly noting the comings and goings of “ships” like fishing boats, freighters, and ferries piloted by people who have actual jobs, and some sense of purpose in their lives. A couple of verses later, he says he roamed “two thousand miles just to make this dock his home.”

Why, I thought, would anyone in their right mind leave a home in Georgia to live on a San Francisco dock steeped in the reek of rotting fish and seaweed?

Fast forward 45 years or so, and a sampling of life in those intervening decades: A lost love or two, plus a whole host of unrealized dreams that withered, not for lack of trying or faith, but simply in the harsh light of reality. Chances are, I’m not going to be a rock star, astronaut, Olympic athlete, world-renowned poet, or any of a dozen other things I might have considered within the realm of possibility when I was young. Throw in relatives and friends who have passed on – sometimes after wrestling long and hard with diseases you wouldn’t wish on a dog – and top it off with random natural disasters that destroy man and man-made things alike with impunity at the drop of a hat.

So the more tolerant, late-50s, me brings a far different context to the song. “(Sittin’ On) the Dock of the Bay” now seems less the empty lament of a dissolute ne’er-do-well than a bittersweet mourning of the passage of worthy, yet unattainable, dreams, and one man’s peaceful acceptance of that fact. Loss doesn’t make you a loser; it’s just part of life. And sometimes, just sitting there resting your bones, watching the mad parade pass by, can be the most peaceful, and productive, way to spend your time.

Let’s Do as the Danish Do: Raise Taxes for Free Health Care

31 Monday Mar 2014

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BY FRANK TERRANELLA

I filed my income taxes this week. I have always thought that the two most patriotic things that most Americans can do are vote and pay your taxes. These days, most Americans don’t vote, and the common wisdom for the past 40 years is that income taxes are too high. This, despite the fact that the richest Americans today pay less than half of what they paid in the 1950s. The ridiculously low income tax rates we have today account for the reason why our health care system is in a shambles.

As I edge my way ever closer to Medicare eligibility, I have to marvel at how dysfunctional America is when it comes to health care. The news from Washington is that 6 million people have signed up for Obamacare, while a new poll shows that 41% of Americans would like it to be repealed. After spending some time recently discussing health care with people in Denmark, I am convinced we are on the wrong track. And the tragedy is we could have avoided all this by simply phasing in Medicare for everyone over a 10-year period. But that might have required raising taxes.

Denmark, like most other developed nations, provides basic health care for free to everyone. It is paid for out of taxes. And if you want to see a Dane get agitated, mention income taxes. They pay roughly double what we pay. But ask them if it’s worth it and they will tell you that, by and large, it is. Oh sure, there are waiting lists for some elective surgery. But when a medical emergency hits, Danes know they don’t have to worry. It’s going to be paid for. They will not be bankrupted by a long hospital stay.

In fact, the only bad thing Danes seem to say about their health care system is that it’s too good. By that they mean it’s so good that people from poorer countries like Romania are flocking to Denmark to take advantage of Danish generosity. As I listened to some Danish women explain this to me, I immediately thought about the way some Americans talk about immigrants, particularly from Latin America, who come to the United States to collect welfare. The difference is that in the United States we have just about dismantled the welfare system, and people are falling through economic catastrophe without a safety net. And we have an army at our Southern border with orders to stop anyone who tries to cross without a visa.

Meanwhile, in Denmark, no matter how much they resent poor people coming to their country for the social benefits, they have not dismantled their social safety net. And because they are part of the European Community, they can’t legally stop the immigration. And some Danes actually see value for their country in allowing immigration. It provides talent and ambition that have always been the lifeblood of any progressive society. They see what America has done as akin to cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Obamacare will not solve America’s health care crisis because it starts from the wrong premise. It doubles down on the system we already have where insurance companies are given the role of health care gatekeeper. Capitalism is so out of control in this country that many Americans actually believe that it’s a good idea to have profit-making companies in a position to decide what medical test you can get. They complain bitterly about a government takeover of health care and actually prefer to have insurance companies in charge. Danes look at this and shake their heads. Why would anyone want a company that has an interest in allowing you as little health care as possible be in charge of health care, they asked me. These companies have a conflict of interest. Isn’t it better to have a neutral government official in that role?

I could not defend our system, except to say that it works very well for rich people. Those who can afford the best insurance here will get excellent health care – better than they would get in Denmark. But for the rest of us, the present system sucks, and Obamacare is not likely to make it much better.

After my conversations in Denmark, I am convinced that the only solution is higher taxes. That’s right, higher taxes. Americans have to get over the hysteria about taxes and see the long-term benefits of not having to worry about a tsunami of a co-pay that we all are one illness away from. And while we’re raising those taxes, let’s make state universities free for eligible students and liberate young people from a lifetime of debt. That’s another good idea we could borrow from Denmark.

Casino Ads Omit the True Gamble of the Game

27 Thursday Mar 2014

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BY BOB SMITH

Occasionally (once a year, maybe), I’ll go to a casino, and throw away a bunch of money at blackjack or craps in exchange for the enticing illusion that the piles of money under the dealer’s fingertips could be mine if only my luck would hold. On any given visit, I’ll burn up two or three hundred dollars before I get disgusted, and acknowledge the cold reality I’ve known all along – you can’t win.

Oh, you might be ahead for a short time, but that’s the tease; the fantasy. You believe it can go on forever, when clearly it can’t. There are odds built into every casino game that guarantee the casino a winning edge. There’s no doubt that if you play long enough, eventually, you’ll lose.

This past November, New Jersey made it legal for the Atlantic City casinos to offer online gaming in an effort to enhance the struggling casinos’ bottom line. Although, so far, the revenue has fallen short of expectations, New Jersey casinos generated an estimated $8 million from online gambling in the first six weeks of the program. And it’s expected to grow from there.

The problem I have with this new extension of New Jersey’s gambling industry is the advertising. In one TV ad, a cool-looking young guy saunters through an ornate casino, singing a jingle set to the tune of “Luck Be A Lady Tonight.” Dressed in a slick, dark Rat-Pack suit, he confidently croons, “I’m playing blackjack online. I’m playing roulette online. Feeling like a mogul hittin’ jackpots on my mobile. I’m playing Caesar’s online!”

Attractive, young women in the casino gaze seductively at him as he strolls by, and the ad ends with him on a red couch cozying up to his very own smokin’ hot brunette in a miniskirt. They’re in front of a blazing fireplace, with a PC opened on her lap, presumably to the Caesar’s online gaming site.

Come on. Feeling like a mogul? Last time I checked, “mogul” was defined (on dictionary.com) as,”an important, powerful, or influential person.” You know – like Donald Trump. Does anyone dream that The Donald sits around playing slot machines, whether online, on a brunette’s lap, or otherwise?

I recall another TV ad for New Jersey online gaming that shows a man with a laptop sitting by himself on a couch in his home. He clicks onto an online gaming site, and suddenly he’s no longer alone, but rather surrounded by all the accoutrements of a bustling casino: a buxom waitress in a bustier with a tray of drinks, a maitre’d offering up a plate overflowing with a juicy steak, a dealer offering up a card with a wink and a smile, a crowd of friends cheering behind him, and slapping his back.

But the reality is that when you’re gambling online, you’re alone. You’re watching cards appear on the screen, and anxiously monitoring your corresponding bank of money, hoping to make the number go up. It’s just you, your dwindling bank account, the lonely clicking of your mouse, and those inexorable odds.

There are an estimated 350,000 compulsive gamblers in New Jersey alone. By now, everyone knows that gambling is as addictive, and potentially as destructive, as tobacco, drugs, and alcohol. Yet while advertising for booze and cigarettes is closely regulated, and requires warnings about the serious health hazards of using those products, gaming seemingly gets a free pass. The ads for online gaming are filled with misleading images of happy people winning money and frolicking in an imaginary casino as they rack up jackpots online. Without any hint that losing is at least a possibility (indeed, a mathematical certainty), isn’t that false advertising?

It’s ironic that the Caesar’s ad, relentlessly upbeat, uses the tune from “Luck Be A Lady,” a song in which Sky Masterson, a hard-core gambler, pleads with lady luck not to desert him, and laments her “very un-ladylike way of running out.” Similarly, there should be a prominent disclaimer at the end of every casino gaming ad that goes something like this: “WARNING – The results shown are not typical.
Most people who engage in casino gambling will lose money.”

It’s a pretty low standard – let’s hold the casinos to the same standard of honesty as the Broadway show tune whose lyrics they’d like us to ignore.

Travel Perks: A Castle, A Fortress, Some Meatballs, and a Fountain (Of Youth)

26 Wednesday Mar 2014

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Elisnore Castle

BY FRANK TERRANELLA

The beauty of travel is that it breaks the monotony that life can become. We are all creatures of habit, and our natural tendency is to do what we have done before. Travel takes us away from what we always do, and challenges us to adapt to something new. It’s not really hard since human beings are kinda great at adapting (when we have to).

Recently, I had to travel to Europe on business. The great part is that I have relatives in Copenhagen. So after the business was done, I was able to enjoy some time with them. Early on the morning of my last day there, my cousin picked me up at my hotel, and we headed north from Copenhagen about 45 kilometers to a town that English speakers call Elsinore, but the Danes call Helsingor. If the name Elsinore sounds vaguely familiar, it’s probably because Shakespeare set one of his most famous plays there. Elsinore is the hometown of Hamlet, fictional prince of Denmark. And the Danes have accommodated tourists by actually building a castle there.

But that wasn’t the principal reason for us to go to Helsingor. It’s a charming little village with lots of very old buildings, stores, and an ancient church to visit. And it has a twin city in nearby Sweden.

So since I had never been to Sweden before, we first got on the ferry to Sweden. The ferry was named (wait for it) the Hamlet. It’s only a 20-minute ride, and the town in Sweden where you land is a village called Helsingborg (apparently some guy named Helsing was a big shot around these parts).

FortressHelsingborg features a medieval-looking fortress at the top of a hill from where we got a great view of the town and the harbor. Of course, after that much exercise, two 60-something guys were ready for lunch. We could have played it safe with burgers at the Helsingborg McDonalds or KFC, but we opted for the challenge of local fare instead. We found a tiny restaurant that had a sign outside advertising their Swedish meatballs special. So we went in, and ordered it. Now, I had never before had the opportunity to have Swedish meatballs. Swedish meatballsIt’s not common fare where I live (outside of my local Ikea). And truth be told, I am not a very adventurous eater. But I couldn’t pass up the chance to have my first Swedish meatballs in Sweden. Of course they were absolutely delicious. We were both glad we decided to take a chance.

My trip to the twin cities of Helsingore and Helsingborg brought home how valuable it is for people our age to put ourselves into situations that force us to break out of the everyday way of doing things. And of course, it wasn’t just the Swedish meatballs. It’s not everyday I climb a fortress in Sweden, and tour cities that were around in Shakespeare’s time. It’s unusual for me to be in two countries where the native languages are ones I do not speak. And during the business portion of the trip, I taught a seminar in English to Danish-speaking students. For me, it was a step outside my comfort zone because I don’t normally address an audience in my job.

However, I think that doing these sorts of things keep us young. So there was a real therapeutic benefit to the trip. And in addition to eating Swedish meatballs in Sweden, I got to eat Danish for breakfast in Denmark!

Color Blind

25 Tuesday Mar 2014

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Ken Art 2

BY KENNETH KUNZ

When I reached my senior year of undergraduate studies, I moved into an old duplex that was probably built in the late 19th or early 20th century. There was an even older cemetery out back, which was cool since we knew our backyard neighbors would not be complaining about any commotion that might ensue from the revelry of a house filled with college students. I moved there on a recommendation of a friend, as it would be the first time in my entire life that I’d have the opportunity to have my own room! Growing up with three brothers meant shared space. That was followed by sharing a dorm room, and then other rooms in other boarding houses. This was a luxury indeed! Funny how that was so special then.

At any rate, I settled in, and somewhere in the ensuing months a new housemate moved in. Some of the men in the house were closely acquainted with him from around campus, but I had only a slightly more-than-casual relationship with him. After a few days of living together, I realized the kinship we were developing was, at least on my part, due to the fact that he so much reminded me of my oldest brother, who was, and remains, one of my role models and heroes. So when people asked me how the new housemate was, I responded that he was just like my older brother. They would ask – how could that be?

Oh, did I forget to mention that my housemate is a man of color? I have done that a lot over the years. How could a black dude remind you of your brother? What??? I was exasperated. In Facebook/Twitter/Text Speak, I was SMH (Shaking My Head). Paid them no never mind. That housemate remains one of my closest and dearest friends to this day. (The subject of college buddies, by the way, is another story … stay tuned.)

Recently, this friend’s lovely daughter, and her children, were in a grocery store checkout line, and the cashier commented that she thought, “Mulatto kids are the most beautiful.” Oh wait, something else I forget to relate – my friend’s daughter has bi-racial parents. I forgot because her mom and dad have always been just my friends – skin pigmentation was never an issue.

So my friend’s grandchildren obviously have a bi-racial genetic makeup. (They are friggin’ gorgeous, by the way.) But mulatto? Last time I heard that term used I think I was in grammar school – that was over 50 years ago for Christ’s sake. The cashier did note that her “granddaughter is mulatto, too.”

Not that the term is a slur or anything, and I really don’t believe the cashier had any overt ill intent in what she said, but she, like those who queried me on my housemate so many years ago, and too many others of that ilk, all retain that subtle bias that seems to simmer at the rim of our society. I was fortunately raised to forgo skin color when evaluating folks, and I still do. But it is frustratingly disturbing, and disheartening, to realize that after all these years, and often so close to my heart, I see instances of the racial divide all too much for my digestion – both mental and gastric.

A well known, though perhaps not so venerated man named King (Rodney), once pleaded for us all to “just get along.” Wish we would. We surely could. We seem to be more influenced by, “just do it,” and deep-seated negative tendencies than by striving to love one another. So much easier to love than hate – to any degree.

Hey, I am no saint. I fall prey to jokes I should disdain. I fight off certain feelings about certain people. My snob index rises sometimes, even though I know I am really not better than anyone else. But when I wholeheartedly have a dislike for folks, it is based on who they are, and not what they look like. That I have down pat. And I will continue to try to improve in my dealings with fellow citizens of Earth.

People all over the world,
Join hands.
Start a love train, love train.

I’m a Stage 4. I’m Santa Claus

18 Tuesday Mar 2014

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BY FRANK TERRANELLA

If you’re like me, you receive a ton of junk email every day. A lot of it still comes via U.S. mail. Most of it now comes via e-mail. While it’s rare to receive a harmful junk mail from your mail carrier, our email is full of potential viruses and dangerous offers.

Many of us have friends who forward stuff they find interesting. One of those emails recently included the following:

THE FOUR STAGES OF LIFE:
1) You believe in Santa Claus.
2) You don’t believe in Santa Claus.
3) You are Santa Claus.
4) You look like Santa Claus.

I was struck with the profound truth of this. The very young are in Stage 1, and cross over to Stage 2 when they go to school and talk to the big kids (or their older brothers). You stay in Stage 2 until you have children, and then, suddenly, you cross over to Stage 3. And when you get to the right side of 50, the odds are you cross over to Stage 4. OK, only some of us make it to Stage 4, but put a white wig and beard on me, and I’m Santa.

All this is just another reminder of the journey we all make as we age. Looking back, it’s been an interesting trip, and I have enjoyed each of the four stages, but particularly the first and third. However, I wonder whether somewhere on the road ahead is a Stage 5, where due to senility, I return to Stage 1. That would really be the circle of life.

New Jersey Beach Looks Like a Million Bucks

13 Thursday Mar 2014

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BY BOB SMITH

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers recently began a beach replenishment project in Bradley Beach. The plan is to dump over a million cubic yards of sand onto the beach between Asbury Park and Avon-by-the-Sea, a few miles south. For scale purposes, a cubic yard takes up about the same amount of space as a normal-sized kitchen stove. What will it cost to gather up, and dump, a million stoves’ worth of sand onto our humble beach? A mere $18.3 million, or about 18 bucks per stove.

It’s a huge project, by any standard. The entire shoreline replenishment project may cost as much as $102 million, and is supposed to cover the beaches from Sea Bright to Manasquan. In fact, it’s the most extensive beach replenishment project the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has ever undertaken, and by volume of sand it’s the biggest beach-fill project in the world.

I can personally testify to the gargantuan nature of the effort: night after night, you can hear the monotonous backup beeps of the bulldozers as they push the new sand around on the beach, in the glare of banks of floodlights run by diesel-powered generators on wooden sledges.

IMG_7551
The process is fascinating. There are two tanker ships they use to suck up a slurry of sand from a designated site offshore. Once one of them is full, it moves into position approximately 100 yards off the beach, and hooks up to a floating pipe about three feet in diameter. That floating, flexible pipe connects to a series of rigid metal pipes of similar size connected end to end, and strung along the shoreline.

Affixed to the discharge end of the pipeline on the beach, there’s an open metal box with heavy-duty wire screen walls measuring probably 10 feet wide, by 12 or 15 feet high, by 10 feet deep. When the tanker is pumping, a gray slurry of watery sand gushes out of the metal pipe, and is forced through the wire mesh, which acts as a filter.

IMG_7562They need that because it seems the best offshore area for grabbing all that sand is located under an area where, years ago, the U.S. Navy blew up old ships, and other cool stuff for fun. Oops, I mean target practice. So periodically, they shut down the flow, and workers climb into the cage to clear out fish, clams, plastic bottles and bags, and any military shells that may have been sucked up by the tanker offshore. That’s a good thing, because rolling over on your blanket to find yourself staring at a hunk of large-caliber unexploded ordnance (i.e., a really big, live bullet) generally doesn’t make for a festive beach day.

Anyway, as the slurry is being pumped out, the jumbo bulldozers continually push it back and forth, away from the discharge end of the pipe, grading and smoothing it to a uniform level from the inland side of the beach down to the surf. Their goal is to restore the beaches to conditions better than they were before Superstorm Sandy, and based on what they’ve completed in Bradley Beach so far, they’ve done that. The beach appears to be just as wide as it was before that storm.

The only problem I have with the project is that they completed the last major beach replenishment project in 2001, and the one before that was some time in the ’90s. Clearly, no matter what we do, the ocean eventually claws the sand right back.

Now don’t get me wrong. As an owner of a home nearby, I’m thrilled that our government sees fit to throw good sand after bad, decade after decade. Maybe they’ll keep funding this kind of Sisyphean fun as long as I’m alive so I’ll always have an expansive swath of beach on which to lay my head.

But is this really a good long-term use of our tax money? I guess it keeps the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers busy. After all, what would they do if it they didn’t have beaches to replenish? Fix our rusted-out, rickety highway bridges? Replace aging water pipes and upgrade the electrical generation and transmission infrastructure so we don’t risk blackouts every summer?

Come on. That stuff’s too easy. And none of it’s half as much fun as pushing around a million stoves’ worth of slurry in the world’s biggest sandbox.

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.

Hats are Off, and ‘Out’

11 Tuesday Mar 2014

Posted by in Concepts, Men

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men in hats

BY FRANK TERRANELLA

There’s a line in the Stephen Sondheim song “The Ladies Who Lunch,” from “Company,” in which the character played in the original production by Elaine Stritch asks, “Does anyone still wear a hat?” That was in 1970. Now, more than 40 years later, those of us who remember them can still ask, “Does anyone still wear a hat?”

The answer is almost no one, male or female, wears a hat for fashion. The only time I see hats on women is when I pass near an African American church on Sundays. There are no hats on fashion runways; no hats on the red carpet at the Oscars. There are no hats in most churches.

Those of us over 50 know full well that it wasn’t always like this. Men and women used to wear hats. Just watch any movie made before 1960. Men wore hats to work. Men wore hats to the ballgame. And I’m not talking about baseball caps. They wore real hats, like fedoras and derbys and homburgs. In summer, they wore straw hats. My grandfathers wouldn’t think of going “out” without their hats.

pat in hatWomen’s hats were an entire industry. Women wore a different one with every outfit. If you wore a coat, you wore a hat. And it wasn’t just for well-off women. Even working women in the movies and television wore hats. Even hard-boiled dames in Raymond Chandler stories wore hats. Lois Lane picked up her hat every time she was leaving the Daily Planet building.

Head coverings were actually required in many Christian churches until the 1960s. I remember there was a nun at the front door of my church who used to pass out handkerchiefs and tissues to girls who forgot their hats. And of course, Easter bonnets were a real thing back then. Women wore elaborate hats to Easter services. And the hat was the chief attraction at the Easter Parade.

The women’s hat industry was so big that they had a special name for a person who designed, made, trimmed, or sold women’s hats. He or she was called a milliner. It’s a word that has disappeared from our world like cobbler and blacksmith.

If I had to speculate at the one event that helped to killed men’s hats, I’d say it was the appearance of President Kennedy at his inaugural in 1961 standing in sub-freezing cold without a hat. Apparently, he wanted to have photographs showing him hatless next to President Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon, both of whom were wearing hats. That was supposed to show that he was a young man of great vigor. It sounds to me like something Vladimir Putin might do today.

Anyway, apparently hat sales plummeted after that as America bought the idea that hats were old-fashioned. And when soon afterward the Catholic Church dropped the requirement that women wear hats to church, the writing was on the wall for milliners.

Of course, hats have never gone away completely. Every so often some celebrity appears wearing a porkpie, a pillbox or a Panama hat. But the days of regular men and women wearing hats for fashion are probably over.

Today, hats are worn for utilitarian purposes — to keep our heads warm in winter and protect them from the sun in the summer. But although I hated as a boy when I had to wear a hat when I got dressed up for a special occasion, I did like looking at other people wearing them and I still do.

Does anyone still wear a hat? Well, now that I’m a grandfather, maybe I’ll start wearing a hat to look the part. I’ll bet I could rock a fedora.