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Table of Contents - New Posts come after Table of Contents

Sometimes when I think of something to write about, I later realize I've already mentioned it. To make it easier, I thought I would include a Table of Contents, ordered oldest to newest, here at the beginning. I plan to make it an annotated one later. I'd love to hear suggestions, comments, complaints that can help shape the blog. I do have plans to go in some new directions. Once you identify an entry of interest in the Table of Contents, check the date mm.dd.yyyy, and use it to find the entry through the "blog archive" buttons on the right of this page.

Table of Contents

03.04.2011 Hello World
03.04.2011 Introduction to St. Pius X
03.23.2011 Getting Around
03.27.2011 Doctor Borschlein
04.13.2011 What do they mean "Don't want for anything"?
04.15.2011 The Grange
04.29.2011 Out in the Boondocks
05.12.2011 Roadside Ice Cream Stores
05.18.2011 Streetcorners
05.28.2011 SPX II - Where have all the classmates gone?
07.06.2011 Summer School
07.11.2011 Jobs
08.14.2011 New School Year
08.14.2011 Maps of Chili and Rochester
08.24.2011 Supermarkets
09.08.2011 An Apology and Dancing Lessons
01.24.2012 Music
08.21.2012 Recent Visit - Summer 2012
01.20.2013 Sports teams and Play
06.24.2013 Oslo
07.01.2013 Paper Route: Democrat & Chronicle
11.21.2013 JFK 50 years ago
03.05.2014 50th Anniversary of SPX Class of 1964
04.30.2014 Chili Center 8
05.27.2014 Learning Spanish
06.18.2014 RIP Tom Perkins
10.28.2014 Chestnut Heights
04.14.2015 A poem to share
04.17.2015 New Blog - Oriole Science Guy
06.12.2015 RIP Sister Walter Anne
06.12.2015 Two more poems
07.29.2015 When did SPX school open?
08.28.2015 Breaking-Up
01.11.2016 Laughter and Tears
01.11.2016 Past and Present
07.17.2016 Prime Rib
09.26.2016 Record cold September 25, 1963
02.14.2017 Snow and Light
05.01.2017 How Little We Knew Each Other
05.04.2017 The Bungalow and Pop Stand on Chestnut Ridge Rd near Fenton
05.26.2017 School Days (Interactive: Reader can add "School Day" memories)
05.26.2017 Spring/Summer 1967
07.28.2019 SPX Cemetery
08.17.2019 50 Years - Summer of 1969
03.25.2020 No "Middle School" at SPX
06.20.2020 Abbey Road, 1970

Abbey Road, 1970

I listened to the Abbey Road album recently, and it brought me right back to 1970; the people, the feelings, the times. I worked at what then was the Kodak plant on Elmgrove Road from July to August that summer, most of the time riding my bike to work the 6-2:30 shift if I remember correctly. The job was packaging Instamatic camera packs (camera, flash cube, wrist cord) as they rolled down the assembly line. (Dull job, relatively good pay.) We took the same positions each day on the line and therefore got to spend a lot of hours, for better or worse, with those beside and across from us. The first and most adamantly conveyed lesson I learned was not to work too fast, not to be more productive than the "regulars" who would be there when we went back to school and didn't want their quotas increased. The second lesson was not to retrieve usable stuff from the trash because the guards at the exits will take you for a thief.

The Beatles run had come to an end and their final album was unlike any other. They were no longer singing the kinds of songs they sang in the earlier days. They seemed to be in a very different place than they had been in the mid-60's. Listening to it 50 years later, it is still stunningly moving.

It so happens that around the time I started working at Kodak, soon after the 4th of July, I was rocked hard by what Dylan might call "a phone call most foul". Of all the things I've experienced in my life, that call probably is up there with the most profoundly hurtful events I've known. It changed me for awhile making me feel a bit afraid that the world could change in an instant from what it was to what it is to be going forward. It changed my inner sense of what was reliable, or for that matter, even what was known. It was a tough call that took years to absorb and process. I think, in the end, what took the edge off it was time and experience enough to realize that such shocking changes are just part of life and something we learn to absorb.

So the songs of Abbey Road, as memorable and inspiring as they are, have an association that is hard to revisit, but at the same time, now, as then, they help me work through and past that call.


And, in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.