Archive » July 2022 » Columns

At any given time, there are about 20 people, men and women both, riding solo around the world on a motorcycle. These intrepid travelers sell all their possessions, try hard to get corporate sponsorship, and then set out on the adventure of a lifetime.

Most of these trips take several years to complete and include all kinds of weather, corruption at borders, illness, and sometimes even kidnapping or violence. To offset these downsides, there is universal compassion for the weary traveler, where the kindness of strangers can build renewed confidence in the overall goodness of humanity.

When they get back home, they often write books and go on speaking tours. It’s nice work if you can: A, get it, and B, survive it.

I’ve read several books by ’round-the-world motorcycle travelers (Glen Heggstad, Ted Simon, and Helge Pedersen are some famous authors in this genre, and there are many more). In one book, the rider found himself in a village deep in Africa. There, an older woman begged him for a book, any book, because she wanted to learn to read and speak English.

He gestured to her as best he could that he didn’t have any books. She persisted, begging him for anything just so she could see some written English. He wound up giving her the instruction manual that came with his helmet. She reacted as if she had won the lottery. That, my friends, is the power of the written word on actual, hold-in-your-hand paper.

To me, the written word is what separates us from all the other animals. Reading and writing let us do all the great things that come only when we work together. Having access to so many great minds from the past truly has been a boon for society.

Thanks to the internet, much of this “content” is now available at the click of a button. While that in and of itself is truly amazing, good old hard copy is not dead yet.

These days, many people start their days by going to a website for the latest news. Not me. I use the web as much as anybody, but I still want an actual newspaper, like this one, in my hot little hands when I really want to understand what’s going on.

Pixels on a screen are too ephemeral for me; I need ink on paper when I’m serious about understanding the big picture. Libraries, one of the greatest inventions of humanity, are a big part of this.

Let’s put it this way: When I have a day off and the weather is decent, I can ride on my motorcycle to the Guilderland Public Library and take out a book. Then I can ride one hundred miles up Route 30, where I’ll find the perfect tree in the beautiful Adirondack Park and sit by the water.

At that point, I don’t need wi-fi or a login and password, or a good battery charge. I can just open the book and be transported to whatever place or time the author chooses to take me. If I were to win the lottery tomorrow — not that I even play very often, but still — I’d do exactly this same trip, as often as I could. There is nothing better.

There are three services the Guilderland library offers to support the sharing of the written word that you might not be aware of. Check with your library; it probably has them as well.

These are all great things that anyone who loves to read and think and share ideas would love. These three things are used book donations, the used magazine exchange, and the Little Free Library. Let’s go through them one at a time.

Most libraries are not accepting donations at this time due to COVID restrictions. However, they often provide third-party donation boxes. In Guilderland, we have boxes from bulkbookwarehouse.com, a company out of Rotterdam, New York, that tries to find good homes for old books.

If you are a baby boomer like me, you might be downsizing your own or your parents;’ houses. There will no doubt be tons of old books lying around. Dropping your books into these bins is much, much better than throwing them out. Think of the old lady in Africa; if they even re-purpose one book for someone like her, the whole program is worth it.

Then there is the magazine exchange. I love magazines and always will, but it gets to a point where you simply don’t have the time, money, and storage space to get all the ones you’d like. Enter the magazine exchange, which is a totally terrific idea.

I read my copy of The New Yorker, drop it off at the magazine exchange at the library, and then pick up a different magazine, like The Economist. How great is that? Again, much better than throwing them out.

Speaking of The Economist, which is a fantastic magazine: When I get lucky and find a used copy of it at the magazine exchange at the Guilderland library, there are always key passages underlined in many of the articles.

The thing is, whoever is doing it has a different idea of what passages I would have considered to be the key passages. So it’s like I’m playing a mental game with a stranger every time I score a copy of The Economist. Great fun.

Finally, there is the Little Free Library. The one at Guilderland can be hard to find at times. Due to all the construction there, like the game whack-a-mole, it pops up in different places. But keeping an eye out for the Little Free Library is worth it.

It’s just a little box on a pole where random books are dropped off and taken out by the general public. When the library was closed for months due to both construction and COVID, the Little free Library was my lifeline. I read at least one book a week, and I discovered many new authors.

What’s very interesting about the Little Free Library is this: It’s never completely full or completely empty. Like a “closed system” in science, it just seems to maintain its equilibrium all year long. That’s just great.

The written word on actual paper is not dead yet. Far from it. Rather, it’s alive and well in this and other great newspapers and good old books and magazines that are still prized and desired all over the world.

Long live the written word that can actually be held in your own hands, an old but still tremendously valuable technology. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to catch up on my reading.

Tuesday, July 11, and our area needs rain. It looks like the whole country needs rain, but not a deluge; a nice three-day steady, soaking rain would do it.

Regardless of the weather, the Old Men of the Mountain met at Mrs. K’s Family Restaurant in Middleburgh. It has been really nice weather to go for a short ride over the mountain and into the valleys. Schoharie, Mohawk, and even the Champlain valley — the small towns and villages are at their best right now.

At one end of the table there was a discussion on black powder. This is powder that goes boom, not the black powder spread over the eggs in the morning. Re-enactors use this powder in considerable amounts during educational re-enactments of times before we had modern firearms.

Many of these events included uniforms and clothing of the period.  Our area is lucky enough to have many authentic locations for these demonstrations to take place like the Old Stone Fort, the New Windsor Cantonment, or even the Mabee Farm.

Also, there are people concerned enough to take part in these re-enactments. Again in our area we have people who partake in doing demonstrations of the Renaissance period.

Unfortunately, none of the OMOTM is in any group that participates in that era of showing history of the period with royal knights in shining armor prancing around. We do, however, have some OFs who can demonstrate the Neanderthal period just by waking up and getting dressed for the day, scribe included.

On Tuesday morning, we discovered we do have a OF who owns his own gun and participates in cannon shoots. These are not cannons of today but guns of the revolution, actually before and after that period. We have OFs with muskets, swords, and now cannons.

This scribe has yet to sit at a table where there are OMOTM who shoot old-fashioned bows (and arrows). The scribe thinks they are the longbow, not these things that go through a series of pulleys and can shoot an arrow through a two-by-four.

Oh, the talents of the OFs! This column has quite often mentioned the many varied talents and interests of the OFs and now we add to this group a cannon re-enactor.

 

Eateries

In Voorheesville, there once was a pizza place called “Smitty’s.” Smitty’s is no longer there and many of the OFs liked going to Smitty’s. The OFs began reminiscing about the place and telling a few stories about their trips to Smitty’s.

The OFs like watching the train run around the ceiling of the place. Without posting signs, a bar entrance, and a dining-room entrance were available, and, after making a couple of trips to Smitty’s, most people knew the ropes. 

Along with this conversation, some of the OFs thought of another place to eat and this time it was not in the valley but at the foothills on the way to Thacher Park. There is a little place to eat in New Scotland called Emma Cleary’s.

This is another place the OFs say is good once the OF learns the ropes on how to order. The ambiance? Well, the dining area is square with tables. That’s about it, but for some reason this eatery seems to be loaded with a certain ambiance.

This discussion was brought up about many places where we go to eat. We talked about how some places go all out to try and create an atmosphere and nothing happens.

These places have fabric tablecloths, live music — the works — and it just doesn’t connect, while others do the same thing and the OF can’t get in the place without a half-hour wait, or reservations in advance.

Then one OF suggested someone could purchase four old outhouses, stick them together, cook burgers on a grill in a shed in the back, and it becomes the best place in town. Go figure.

One OF wondered why a slab of bacon is a slab of bacon but a BLT in one place is nothing like a BLT in another; the same goes for a tuna sandwich. A can of tuna is a can of tuna — how can the same fish taste so different in different places?

One OF suggested he thinks half the OFs don’t know what they are eating; it is just the comradery along with all the yakking that goes on, yet some are pseudo connoisseurs and have taste buds that can detect one grain of pepper too much.

 

“Don’t ever move!”

One of the OFs is moving. The name will be suppressed so the law can’t find the OF; however, it isn’t very far.

The advice from this OF is the same advice the OF received from another OF who moved to warmer climes just to get out of New York’s weather. The advice was “You OF, don’t ever move!”

The moving OMOTM, OF now understands why this OF gave that advice. It is work, it is confusing, and it is very tiring.

Not only is it physical, and at the ages of the OFs who now take hours to do what they used to do in minutes, it is understanding who, how, and what agency to let know the address has changed, let alone having to let all your friends (if they are still alive) know the new phone number.

This is unless the OF is astute enough to know how to operate a “smart phone” and not have to change the number.

Those OFs who made it to Mrs. K’s Restaurant in Middleburgh and did not show up in animal skins were Wally Guest, Harold Guest, Paul Muller, Doug Marshall, Glenn Patterson, Mark Traver, Joe Rack, Ken Parks, Russ Pokorny, Frank Dees, Jake Herzog, Wayne Gaul, Bill Lichliter, George Washburn, Pete Whitbeck, Robie Osterman, Gerry Chartier, Duncan Bellinger, Rich Vanderbilt, Elwood Vanderbilt, Bob Donnelly, Dave Hodgetts, Ed Goff, Johnny Dap, and me.

— Photo from Larry Rockey

An old Case baler: “The kid on the right could be me without the hat, and the guy on the left could be Bambi hooking the wires,” says John R. Williams. “Hot, dusty work but we didn’t know it.”

On July 5, the Old Men of Mountain marched to the Middleburgh Diner in Middleburgh, but this scribe was not among them. At times priorities have a pecking order, and in this case one priority out-pecked another priority, and this scribe could not be in two places miles apart at the same time, no matter how the scribe tried to maneuver the clock so it could be done.

One of the OFs did send an email on what (the OF could remember) was discussed; however, names eluded the OMOTM and names were not on the report. It was reported the group was smaller than usual with the astute observation by the OMOTM that he thought the holiday on the fourth might have had something to do with it.

As many travel through the countryside in late spring and early summer, they may notice many of the fields have either round bales of hay or rectangular bales of hay, commonly known as square bales. As reported over and over, many of the older OFs in the group were farmers, and the current crop still has a few that were.

The question came up: How many square bales are there in a round bale?

Those who worked the fields just did the math in their heads without using numbers per se. Even the kids would figure this out without being told or taught. They would hear the farmers talk about how much hay was in the barn and if they had enough to go through a tough winter.

The OMOTM, as kids, never heard of round bales; some were even pitching loose hay with horses, or hauling hay to stationary balers. No matter what, the calculation was: So many cows ate so much hay whether it was loose, square, round, hex, or tubular.

The math on this would be: If a field produced 800 square bales, and the same field produced 40 round bales, there were 20 square bales per round bale. Pad and paper not needed.

However, farming knowledge required asking the following questions. Was it a thin year for hay, or a heavy year? How was the timing? Was it tender, or tough? Was it caught with all the nutrients in it, or late when not so much? What field looked like good feed, and another loaded with weeds would make better bedding or mulch? Hayin’ tain’t like mowing grass around the house, fellas.

Seeing as it is a hay day when some of the OFs were YFs and hay balers first came out, a feature of many of these machines was a couple of cranks on the discharge end. These cranks were used to control the weight of the bale. The tighter the crank — the heavier the bale.

Some of the fathers, or farm owners, would crank those suckers almost down to the stops so the bales would be really heavy. That would make for more room in the mows; same amount of hay, fewer bales.

In many cases, it was the kids who had to pick up the bales and throw them on the wagon, and again in many cases, another young-un on the wagon was mowing the bales away on a swaying wagon in such a way that a big load of bales could be put on the wagon without the hay falling off as the wagon bounced across the field.

So what the kids would do, at least on this scribe’s farm, was to sneak around and crank those cranks back up so the bales would be lighter when they went out in the fields to pick them up.

The scribe’s dad caught on to this so he cranked the cranks down just before they started out to bale. What fun.

This was many years ago; whatever happened to those years? The smell of fresh-cut hay, out in the sun, working your butt off from sunrise to sunset, loving every minute of it and not knowing it.

 

Carrying on

Another OF who has been mentioned before is retired from the Air Force National Guard and was stationed in Glenville with the unit that maintains the research facility in Greenland, which has been in the news a few times. This OMOTM was on the last mission out and brought back pictures of his trip that just ended.

The OMOTM who made a few notes has the same problem that this scribe does. When old folks get together, the conversation quite often turns to doctors and health, along with aches and pains.

In this OF’s email his comments and conversations eventually turned to doctors and health, aches and pains. Who would have guessed that, in a group with the name Old Men of the Mountain?

Those Old Men of the Mountain that made it to the Middleburgh Diner regardless of their aches and pains were: Doug Marshall, Miner Stevens, Marty Herzog, Jake Herzog, Frank Deez, Russ Pokorny, Rev. Jay Francis, Gerry Chartier, Harold Guest, Wally Guest, but not me.

Rodney Dangerfield performing in 1972.

What a mess erupts these days when people start talking about what is, and what is not, funny. America’s funny bone has become a raw bone. In some circles, making a comedic faux-pas deserves life without parole and no thought of forgiveness.

Last month, David Weigel, a political reporter for The Washington Post retweeted something he found funny. The original Tweet was: “Every girl is bi. You just have to figure out if it’s polar or sexual.”

The post was made by Cam Harless whose website “camharless.wordpress.com” describes him as: “Writer. Husband. Father. Follower of Jesus. Barbarian.” A puzzling farrago.

Never mind finding the joke funny, Felicia Sonmez, a colleague of Weigel at The Post went on Twitter and started to shout: are you kidding! that’s outrageous! NF! [My exclamations; my paraphrase.] When seeing her words in print, I feel the ire.

Then Sonmez started going at The Post in front of the world: She tweeted: what kind of paper allows a reporter to make fun of women like that! [More paraphrase.]

I wondered if anybody in management thought the joke funny.

Weigel saw what was going on; not wanting to get into anything, he went back on Twitter with: “I just removed a retweet of an offensive joke. I apologize and did not mean to cause any harm.”

And I wondered, because so many people make false apologies these days, if Weigel, despite his shared regret, still found the joke funny: he just wanted people off his back.

I see humor in the joke — from a certain cultural comedic frame of mind, it’s funny.

Of course The Post weighed in. The paper’s chief communications officer, Kristine Coratti Kelly, got on the tweeter-horn — the mind-shaping-instant-opinion-forming network — and said, “Editors have made clear to the staff that the tweet was reprehensible and demeaning language or actions like that will not be tolerated.”

Id est, management’s vote was: not funny.

But I haven’t seen where the paper spent time explaining to staff its position on funniness and laying out what it, as a political-economic institution, will not tolerate in its workers.

Those who have studied the nature of sincere apology would say The Post offered a standard by-the-book version, the best a capitalist institution can do, even one with a motto: Democracy Dies in Darkness.

Before I accept the Post’s apology I want to see the results of a two-question questionnaire they’ve administered to every employee, the first question being: Did you find the joke funny? The second: Why did you say yes or no to the first question? And, as in math, show all work, your ethical thinking.

Did any boss at any level say to any staff member at the paper that keeping his job required him to espouse a particular comedic frame of mind — pointing out exactly where “the line” is, and what happens to those who cross it?

Here’s the update: Despite his remorse, Weigel was suspended for a month — no pay. [Where does a guy like that come up with next month’s rent?]

Sonmez kept at it, pulling her colleagues into the fray. They started tweeting their views on funniness, whether Weigel was right, and whether a paper is responsible for training its workers properly. For a day or two, Twitter was a Wapo warzone.

I had, and still have, no quibbles with Sonmez’s view. It’s worth discussing. It’s the means she took to deal with the hurt. She went to the world on Twitter to find relief rather than walk down to HR and demand a meeting of all staff — top to bottom — to discuss what is and what is not funny, what people at the paper can and cannot say, and what the paper’s responsibility is for worker deportment — even the guy in the mailroom.

That is, rather than deal with the issue structurally, Sonmetz blazoned her torch on Twitter. That’s not to say her point of view should not be available to everyone, it’s that she went for “the show” and not for policy elucidation and structural change.

And I have not seen anything that says The Post has taken action to delineate what people at the paper can and cannot say.

The other sad part of the story is that on June 9, The Post fired Felicia Sonmez. True. They said it was for, “misconduct that includes insubordination, maligning your coworkers online and violating The Post's standards on workplace collegiality and inclusivity.”

Violating workplace collegiality means Sonmez, and those of her mind-set, failed the section of the Miss Manners course on “cooperative workplace.”

How will Sonmez come up with the rent for who knows how long? And, according to the book, canceling someone is not a show of collegiality, it’s a failure in leadership.

When she went on Twitter, the paper needed to call her in right away, slow her down, say they were ready to listen but wanted her first to sit down and write out all her thoughts. And because they needed it soon, she had time-off to do it — with pay.

And the paper needed to say it would convene a synod — to which every Post employee was invited — where there would be discussed the difference between a funny that relieves pain and a funny that causes it, at least more pain than it relieves.

Which is the measuring rod of ethical comedy: the relieving of pain versus causing it.

Here’s the joke again: “Every girl is bi. You just have to figure out if it’s polar or sexual.”

Funny or not funny? Why? Show all work.

One of the greatest comedians of all time, Rodney Dangerfield — Comedy Central ranked him seventh best of all time, one behind Steve Martin and right before Chris Rock — was enamored with people’s idiosyncrasies.

Playing the sad sack he kept moaning, “I get no respect.” He was always getting the short end of the stick: with his kids, his doctor, lawyer wife, girlfriends — they all disappointed. He liked fat jokes and ugly jokes.

One night on Carson, he started in on the women he met. One of them, he said, “was no bargain … she was FAT!”

And Rodney’s fans in the audience, taking the bait, came right back: “HOW fat!?”

And he, loving the joust, looked in their direction and fired back: “HOW fat?  [I’ll tell you how fat] When she wears high heels, she strikes oil, OK!”

And you know what? “I met her at the Macy’s Parade, she was wearing ropes!”

HOW fat was she?! “She got on a scale, a card came out and said One at a Time.”

That’s right, “She was standing alone, a cop told her to break it up.”

Funny or not funny?  Pain-relieving or pain-causing?

Rodney went at “ugly” people too. What power does anyone, whose looks have veered far from the hub of beauty, have to tackle such a trope? They were already dismissed.

George Carlin is the best stand-up comedian ever — Dave Chapelle was wrong last month — sure, George berated Americans for being absolutely stupid, unable to wake even when hit with a two-by-four. But he turned the spotlight from the idiosyncratic to the powerful — people and ideas — and, like Jeremiah, began chanting “Converte, Jerusalem.”

He took on religion, God, child-rearing, education, play, drugs, imagination, personal responsibility — the meaning of life — and exposed “the line” of acceptance, letting everybody know what was waiting on the other side.

Indeed, in 1972 the Milwaukee police arrested him at Summerfest for using the English language on stage — seven words — like he was Al Capone.

I can’t figure out if George was brutally funny or funnily brutal.

Would Rodney play today? With the fat, ugly, and loser jokes? I recently realized he was dystopian.

In this next phase of our collective existence, we’ve been called to clarify what language relieves pain and what language causes it: and how much control anyone in the future will have over what he can say about how he truly feels.

Mrs. Weeks's second-grade class, 1990-91: The author is at the top left; Randy and Evan are at center in the first row.

Evan, Jesse, and Randy, 31 years hence.

Goodbye dear friends,
it’s time to be moving along.
Goodbye and so long, we’ll meet again—
but now we’ll be drifting along.

Dear Graduates of the Class of 2022:

It’s likely you kept right on swiping, scrolling, or snapping without a second thought upon encountering one of the internet’s many anonymous memes. But for folks of a certain age — the ones who recall their own high school graduations as though they were last week — this particular anonymous quote is arresting:

“At some point in your childhood, you and your friends went outside to play together for the last time, and nobody knew it.”

Life’s truest parables have no identifiable author, as their wisdom is so self-evidently universal. Pearls like these cause a quick catch in the throat, a nod of the head in knowing resignation, but ultimately elicit no more than a passing regard as those folks of a certain age keep right on keeping on, having long ago accepted that there’s no way back to the way things were.

So take a moment, Class of 2022. Because this moment — the one you’re in right now — is “the way things are.” Yet in just a few months, it’ll begin metamorphosing into an entirely new temporal creature that you’ll reference, contrast, recollect, and unwittingly idealize until your end of days. Soon, this moment — the one capping the end of your high school career — will emerge like a chrysalis from the cocoon of late adolescence to spread its sepia wings as “the way things were.” And you’ll never find anything like it again.

By way of guidance as you embark on adulthood’s long slog, here are a few more lyrics from the hit song “Good-bye” off of 1975’s debut banger “We All Live Together, Vol. 1” by children’s music duo Greg and Steve:

Good luck and keep strong. 
We hope to see you soon.
Until we meet again,
we’ve gotta be moving along.

What just happened? From what Rip Van Winkle-grade coma did I just awake? A minute ago, I was a high school senior strutting ’cross the stage with my diploma, yet now my doctor’s telling me I should emotionally prepare for annual prostate exams? What’s become of the past 21 years, all of which I can pretty comprehensively reduce to 10 words (to wit, “I went to school, got a job, bought a house”)?

I can’t answer these questions; I know only that I move slower as the years move faster. But I can offer a lifehack to the Class of 2022.

First, some background:

This past May, I was sipping whiskey in an old tractor barn on the farm just up the road from where I grew up. The whiskey was produced by a company I own along with several buddies from childhood; with me that night were the farm’s fourth-generation owner and the guy who’s leading our sales effort — two fellow graduates of Voorheesville’s Class of 2001.

As the three of us surveyed our company’s forthcoming grain needs and plotted the planting season, someone casually wondered whether we’d ever been in the same elementary school class together. We began ticking off the roster of our past teachers, and quickly determined that yes, we’d jointly spent second grade under the tutelage of Mrs. Corinne Weeks.

So began a weeklong scramble to find that ancient class photograph. A search through our albums and archives — along with a dozen calls to past classmates, the school district, and the local library — proved fruitless... until I was directed to Mrs. Weeks herself. She answered my phone call with a voice I’d not heard in 30 years.

“Yes, I’m pretty sure I have it,” she said, when I asked after the class picture with breath bated and fingers crossed tight enough to cut off circulation. Of course she had it.

Though I’d ascertained that the 1990-91 class year was one of the few for which no elementary school yearbook had been published, I should’ve anticipated that an elementary school teacher — that embodiment of self-sacrifice, gentle authority, fiduciary responsibility, and near pathological extremes of organizational skills — could be counted on even in retirement to maintain records as dutifully as she had whilst teaching hundreds of children throughout her long career.

I was in my Jeep in 30 seconds.

Mrs. Weeks was sweeping her porch in the evening dusk when I arrived; central casting couldn’t have concocted a more fitting “former elementary school teacher.” Now in her 80s, she was as warm and pleasant as ever. Her embrace was sweet yet surreal as — in accordance with one of time’s more tangible oddities — I now towered over a woman whom I’d last known to tower over me. She welcomed me into her home and led me to the photograph.

There we were: Randy, Evan, and me, interspersed with a score of instantly identifiable faces which would surely take me a beat to recognize in person today. For a few minutes, Mrs. Weeks (she insisted I call her Corinne, as if that were psychologically viable) and I together studied the photo; I offered as many cursory anecdotes and updates as I could concerning these former 7- and 8-year-olds now on the cusp of 40.

Their names flowed freely from my memory, which shouldn’t have been such a surprise, given that I’d lived every weekday during that 1990-91 school year with the very children now looking out at me from a shutter-speeded instant 31 years prior. In the decades since, the lives that intertwined in Mrs. Weeks’s classroom had radiated outward on 23 distinct journeys.

There were marriages and divorces, a few run-ins with the penal system, some intra-class romances, children, brave declarations of sexual identity, professional successes, family tragedies, and even deaths. To two of the people who’d been immortalized with me on 35mm film that day, I never got to say goodbye.

And this, 2022 Graduates, brings me to the lifehack.

The only thing we can ever truly own is our choices. Our choices — and their consequences — define our paths and identities. As complemented by a bit of chance, they create the sum total of who we are and, as importantly, how we’ll be remembered.

Choosing to live your life in a way that engenders fondness in former teachers and classmates who reconnect to reminisce about “the way things were” three decades hence will better equip you with an unparalleled resource: home.

Right now, you no doubt take “home” for granted. Good; you’ve been home long enough. It’s time to see what the world looks like a hundred or a thousand miles away, to take the risks that having a home to come home to makes possible, to redefine who you are. But don’t forget where you came from.

Life is a cascading waterfall of interminable goodbyes. And in the end, everything you love will be taken from you. But the goal, counterintuitively, is to ensure that there’s just so much to be taken — so many friends, so many people to love, so many cherished artifacts of your time on this planet.

If you do that, you’ll always have a safe place to which you can return — a place where people will give you a second chance for what you are because they remember what you were.

In just the past few months, an entrepreneurial venture which sprang from the creative minds of a few former kids in that second-grade class photo has realized a degree of success I never dared imagine. Renewing friendships to build a business has resulted in a business that now renews more friendships. And after having been away from home for the last 20 years, nothing is more humbling than feeling a community reopen its arms to one of its native sons.

So that’s what’s up, Graduates of the Class of 2022. You won’t know it at the time, but one day you and your friends will set out on what will later prove to be the last time you were all together. Maybe it’s a party this summer, maybe it’s a destination wedding or a 10-year reunion, maybe it’s some random Tuesday night in 2031 when you all get together for a drink before spouses, kids, and careers conspire to pull your clique to the four corners of the country — assuming Providence even keeps you around that long.

But for me and the friends with whom I’m building my company, that day hasn’t come yet.

And therein lies your lifehack: Bring your friends from the classrooms of your adolescence to the boardrooms of your adulthood; make the antics and exploits you pursued in study hall and detention, on stage and the sports fields, at recitals and school dances, be your path to success at the office, warehouse, garage, store, or salon.

Because life is full of goodbyes, but goodbyes don’t have to be forever. And if you look closely at the class photos from throughout the scholastic career you’ve just completed, you may find the very people who — with a bit of ingenuity and the skills you first honed in school — will someday be your partners in a grand new adventure at the start of life’s second half.

Keep in touch with your former fellow classmates, make amends if you make a mistake, and be willing to lend a hand where it counts. Because Mrs. Weeks isn’t responsible for looking after us anymore, but she has every expectation that we keep looking after each other.

And I have the same expectation for y’all. High school may be over, but you’ll always be bound together by the way things were.

Goodbye and so long,
good luck and keep strong.
And keep on ’a singing a song.

On Tuesday, June 28, the Old Men of the Mountain met at the Chuck Wagon Diner in Princetown. Early in the morning, traveling west on Route 20 just about anywhere, there are not many people actually headed in either direction. Add a few hours and the area between (the localities are just a guess) Richfield Springs and the Northway, the highway is abuzz with vehicles with the drivers all late for work.

It seems for most people life is divided by events that happened which are either joyful, traumatic, or in some way meaningful, to each individual. These events can be the same, albeit totally different, depending on the person’s perception. In some cases, the event won’t mean a thing to one OF, but to the another OF it may mean a lot.

Birthdays, weddings, funerals, graduations, college, learning to drive, first car, first kiss, military, scoring a winning touchdown in a big game, are just a few of the major events that can enter the lives of all of us.

Tuesday morning, it was military, and the loss of a loved one and how these incidents affected the lives of some, while to others the same events didn’t mean much; they were just a part of life and living. The OFs, as often noted, are a microcosm of everyone (male at least) thrown in one pot.

 

Updates from the trail

Tuesday morning had reports of the OFs who are hikers and how they did, and what they did on their solstice hikes. The Looking Glass path hikers had nine people marching along with the flag of the “Long Path-ers” waving proudly up front.

The group sang camp songs as they marched along.  This makes a nice, fun group out for a walk.

Then another couple of OFs were planning on building a raised walkway on the path in Dutch Settlement. At the Tuesday breakfast before the job was to be done, the OFs planning the project were concerned about how they were going to get the material up a very steep hill to the site to even get the job underway.

The OFs were very much surprised at how many volunteers turned out to help. A job the OFs planned would take about two days took less than a day because so many helped — including a troop of Boy Scouts.

Now hikers can transverse that area of the path safely. This section of the path at times was very muddy and slippery, and at times during the year some areas have about six to eight inches of water running across the path. Now the hikers are high and dry.

 

Fuel rates

A couple of OFs are on degree day rate with various oil companies for delivery of fuel oil. Some of the OFs with this pay-in-advance plan with locked-in prices have made out very well for this past winter.

However, for some others, those contracts have expired. Even though we have had a few warm days, the OFs said ,not only has it been cool so far this late spring and early summer but very dry, at least in our section of the country.

One OF said, when looking at the weather map, it looks like most of the country is on fire and here in the Northeast it is cool enough for the furnace to kick in on occasion.

This is the problem: Some OFs automatically are in line for a drop of fuel oil because of the degree/day formula and the tanks are topped off.

One OF said that, when he saw that bill, his hand shook; it was over $1,000. “Where is this amount of money coming from?” he asked. “It sure wasn’t in the budget, and neither were $200 grocery bills.”

The OF said he has to go into his savings to augment paying for bills like this.

If the politicians want to force us to use electric cars and now electric heat because they have their money invested in batteries and windmills, they are doing a good job of it.

There has to be some reason for all this, one OF said; it has happened too much too fast, and seems to be well organized, and well planned. All the truckers and pilots did not fall into some giant pit, along with all the other workers.

“How did they all disappear in just a few weeks?” the OFs asked.

The OFs think this is kinda weird.

Scribe’s note: The OFs have discussed this before, and probably will again, as their wallets get thinner and thinner. One OF said we have to follow the money, see who is getting the bigger boat, and fancier car, and moving to 5,000-square-foot houses by the ocean.

Those OFs who made it to the Chuck Wagon Diner, and arrived on horseback, or bicycle from their new homes (which are tents out in the woods) — some even used the old symbol for transportation, “the thumb,” to get to the breakfast — and they were: Jake Herzog, Paul Muller, Johnny Dap, Ted Feurer, Wayne Gaul, Jay Williams (guest of the scribe), Rich Lagrange, Doug Marshall, Wally Guest, Frank Dees, Robie Osterman, George Washburn, Bill Lichliter, Pete Whitbeck, Joe Rack, Mark Traver, Glenn Patterson, Russ Pokorny, Elwood Vanderbilt, Bob Donnelly, Lou Schenck, Herb Bahrmann, and me.