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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.

No "Middle School" at SPX

If someone in the early 1960s peeked into any classroom of the SPX  grammar school, they would see perfect rows of desks filled with uniformed kids, any one class differing from any other only in the difference of a few inches in the average height of the students. For those eight years, we were pretty much subject to the same rules and expectations as we grew from age six to age thirteen or fourteen. The bigger world was presented to us through a dense filter which seemed to be based on the theory that if something is not discussed it does not exist.

Even as this regimentation and censorship defined our outer world,  our inner worlds were teeming with the natural disorder we encountered as we grew older and inevitably experienced outside the rigidity of the classroom.

Our “middle school years” were not defined inside the school, but outside the school our activities reflected our new interests and curiosities. One thing we needed - which church youth clubs did not provide - was a place to go where we could hang out and socialize unwatched by those who had power over us. A budding wish for privacy and independence. Such places were hard to come by.

I have mentioned in previous entries how we would hang out on street corners or in houses under construction. Certainly there was a lot of time spent playing basketball or just walking around. The  unique thing about those years was that our world was still small, it was still defined mostly by the confines of the parish, so in a way we were very much under the eyes of parents and church authority. But we were wrestling with that urge to have some independence.

One opportunity opened up in the Fall of 1963 when we started gathering after school at what was an oddity in those days, a house where the Mom went to work and therefore wasn’t home for those all-important 3:30-5:00 hours. The house was on one of those streets off the south side of Chili Avenue between Chestnut Dr and Marshall Rd. I don’t remember many details of the afternoons we spent around that house, perhaps there weren’t even that many, but the idea of having somewhere to go where we could just hang around and socialize was very important at the time. The thing that stands out to me now was that it was a place where we could talk to girls.

Soon after we were thrown out into the much bigger and more diverse world of high school. Looking back, we might have been much better prepared for such a change had we been given more of a transition time, more of a middle school experience.

50 Years - Summer of 1969

Woodstock at 50 is in the news as this week marks the 50th anniversary of "the concert I didn't attend".

I was washing dishes in the kitchen of Brooklea CC while some of my Chili buddies headed off to the concert. In truth, I don't remember regretting not being able to go. There was a scene surrounding the festival that seemed ominous to me. Many felt it out to some degree, but it was scary how it seemed to grab hold of some.

It was quite a summer. Having returned home after an enjoyable 1st year of college, it started off with an ill-fated prom at Mercy; definitely NOT the fault of my prom partner, it was just an awkward time. I tried to apologize about it once but there was no recovering from that one. The awkwardness had to do with transitions that were inevitably happening as our worlds were changing. In retrospect, my biggest regret about such transitions is that they were made in such a definitive way. If only we had had the wisdom to make them a little softer, it might have been less awkward to revisit those friends later on. If we could have just known how natural it was for our friends, like ourselves, to grow and change, or for differences to arise which might preclude certain ways of being but not others, or even just to have given them the benefit of the doubt in whatever arose, we might have been able to look back on a more continuous path than one littered with discontinuities.

I got a summer job with a construction company building the Child St bridge of 490. They said I'd be helping the "engineers" but in fact I was a pure gopher and when I brought it up they just chuckled. I was foolishly indignant and foolishly quit which explains why I was washing dishes at Brooklea for the rest of the summer.

In July everyone gathered around the TV to watch Neil Armstrong step onto the moon. I wish I could recall who exactly was sitting around our TV that night, but I do remember many of us were sitting on the floor. It seemed like a positive highlight about the times we were living in and a welcome respite from so much more troubling news of the day.

It's kind of amazing to think that the moon landing and Woodstock happened a month apart. Like I said I was not that interested in attending Woodstock at the time, but that is not to discount how great the music was. We would listen to that music for years to come...some of the great rock performances of all time. Maybe the whole festival would have seemed more positive if only it hadn't rained so incessantly.

Summers seemed longer then. They were sort of endless. By the time the school year began it was always like a new beginning. We would return to school a little older and a little different for all our summer experiences.

SPX Cemetery

Last week I took a ride out to see the old (1854) St. Feehan's grounds. I knew that the church itself had been moved to the Genesee Country Museum site, but I was still expecting something to remain of the rest of the complex.

Well, I was wrong. There is only the cemetery and some remembrances from the new new church that burned a few years ago. And the cemetery is smaller than I remembered it in my probably near 60 years since memory. The cemetery is situated around a looped drive off Chestnut Ridge Rd and it is surrounded on two sides by homes and in the back by trees behind which are more homes. Indeed, it is a modest area poised in the middle of a developed housing area; not what I had expected.

Given all that, I decided to walk through the cemetery expecting to some more familiar names than I actually did. Along the main loop there is a large stone cross close next to which is the gravesite of Fr. Murphy and two other priests. There is a new area on the far side of the loop which has some room for the future. Although there were not as many familiar names as I expected, there were many I did recognize. Mostly the parents of kids we knew from those schooldays at St. Pius X. The thing that struck me the most was how many veterans of World War II were buried there. It was such a telling reminder of just how much that war impacted the lives of that generation. If you were not directly involved yourself, people you knew were. Fr. Murphy himself was a chaplain and no doubt his experiences shaped him and indirectly all he later pastored over. For those of us born after that war, there has never been such a grand scale calling to arms and so it is hard to fully appreciate what our parents lived through before bring us into the world.

It sure would have been nice to have talked more to them about their pre-us lives.

Spring/Summer 1967

So in the "I Like Ike" 50's it was Guys and Dolls and West Side Story and Elvis and those teen angst songs on the AM radio. Then the 60's rolled in with JFK and the Viet Nam and maybe the biggest thing for emerging teens - the British Invasion and the West Coast music infusion. There was a feeling that the times were changing as the baby boomers got their first tastes of freedom.
No matter what the hype about those days, I have the feeling that most of what we all experienced in terms of our social interactions - tensions with adults, trials and errors with dating, finding stuff to do with the guys that was acceptable and novel, etc. - wasn't so much different than generations before or since, even if the particulars were different.

As May rolled around this year I was taken back to Spring 1967, fifty short years ago, when a few things happened that made lasting impressions on me. I thought I'd share a couple of them in the spirit of sharing a flavor of the times - at least my times, which were probably pretty typical.

We were finishing up our third year of high school. I was working after school delivering notions by handcart to the major downtown department stores (Sibley's, McCurdy's, Edward's) for a little tightly cramped hole-in-the-wall shop on Clinton Avenue. This gave me a little spending money during the school year and it felt good to have that little bit of independence. With school and work there wasn't much time for much else.

One evening, out of the absolute blue, I got a phone call invitation to an upcoming dance at St. Agnes. This girl was someone I had never spoken to but somehow she must have heard that I had admired her from afar. So now I was going to meet her at this dance in a couple of weeks. How to wake up a 16 year old boy!! But it never happened. It doesn't really matter why, but I had to call and cancel...and I never did talk to that girl - nor did I ever forget how excited I had been when she called. This was the kind of experience that just has to shape us in whatever mysterious way such things do.

Around that same time there was a prom being planned at my school but I had no intention of attending. There just wasn't anyone for whom I felt inclined to shell out the prom bucks. Instead, I went to the Grange that night and lo and behold met this cool girl who lived in the city and attended Monroe HS. (What was she doing at the Grange?) We hung out and had fun and that was that. But she needed a ride home and when my older brother came to pick me up he said he'd drive her home. So we did and while doing so made plans to get together the next day. I picked her up at home and we just drove around for a few hours in the afternoon. It was a great day. I think we went to Ellison Park. We hit it off, talked easily, really nice. But that was that. We never spoke again. Can't remember why. Just remember the day. Another interaction that must have shaped me somehow.

That summer I started working at Sky Chef preparing food for on-board flights. I worked the breakfast and lunch shift so I had to get there at 6:00 am everyday and work until 2:30. Again, not much time left for fun and adventure. It was kind of a lost summer. We went to the Grange on Friday or Saturday nights, played pool at friends' houses or Olympic Park, and otherwise not much. In those days, every airline meal was served with a mini-pack of four Winston cigarettes. I had resisted the temptation to start smoking through three years of high school, but these free cigarettes were smoked by everyone who worked there on their breaks. After a while the less than exciting work led to my dabbling. Soon I was cruising around with a box of free cigs on the console for all to share. Yeah, RJ Reynolds knew what they were doing with those freebies!!

We ended up the summer with a trip to NYC. I had a free ticket as a bonus for working the summer. Originally it was just me and two friends going. Unbeknownst to us, word got out and another group of four or five guys made a separate trip at the same time. We all met up in NYC where we got two rooms at a fleabag hotel near Greenwich Village (which was, after all, the hot spot in the news those days). We were so young and such hicks, maybe if we had never gone we wouldn't have learned it so hard. I've got to hand it to my mother for allowing me to go and quench my wanderlust a little, but what a disaster. We wrote postcards the day we got there and beat them home!

Lots of things shape us. When I think back about all these things we did I realize that no one thing overwhelms our development. Instead, it seems like we go along and make decisions day by day based on the things happening around us and in the end we have a life. If, in our day to day decisions we help, or at least not hurt others, that life is okay.

School Days

   I thought it would be fun to capture some details of life at SPX in the 60's. I will try to get things started but I am sure there are folks out there who could add all kinds of interesting things to my list. So, if anyone sees this and has memories to add, please feel free.
 
   We never wore sneakers to school. Always leather shoes with our uniforms.

   On the first day of school each year the floors were waxed and everything looked like new.

   Sometimes we would be called out of class to serve (as altar boys) at a funeral mass.

   There was always a flip chart at the front of the room with religious pictures.

   Boys and girls seemed to exist in different orbits.

   We had exams in January and June that came from the diocese (Catholic school standardized exams)

   Some kids actually went home for lunch, the rest of us ate at our desks.

  Everyone had the same lessons every day.....no matter how you were doing in school.

   The class sizes were pretty big, ours was about 40 but others were as large as 50+.

   We sat at the same desk all day every day for the whole school year.

If you have a memory to add please enter year of graduation and your submission

SPX graduation year:

Comment:

The Bungalow and Pop Stand on Chestnut Ridge Rd near Fenton

In the 50's and 60's Chestnut Ridge Rd merged into Chili Avenue just past Fenton. Just before that merge, heading east from SPX, one passed The Bungalow just before Fenton and the Pop Stand at Fenton. Each had an impact on our lives. The Bungalow's site is now a modern day convenience store, the Pop Stand is no more and Chestnut Ridge no longer merges into Chili Ave.in the same way. So this will just serve as a reminder of how things used to be.

The Bungalow was the one and only commercial place we could go sans parents as elementary school kids. Either walking home from school or out cruising with friends it was a place to buy a candy bar or baseball cards or a popsicle with the nickels or dimes or even quarters we might have on us from allowance, paper routes, odd jobs or whatever means we might have come upon some change. The great thing was the feeling of independence it gave us ... to walk in and pick out something we wanted and get it without any questions asked. The store was smaller than the modern day store and it faced Chestnut Ridge with its small entrance door. We didn't know the grownups who ran it but I'm sure in retrospect they knew us well. Maybe they put up with our shenanigans because they knew we would be future customers of greater monetary worth.

I don't remember a lot about the Pop Stand. It was a large wooden structure, like a large garage, or barn, with a sloping floor (?) in the main pop crate storage area and a little checkout area next to the storage area. As I recall it, the pop was sort of generic, and maybe it was meant for mostly bulk purchases. I'm kind of fuzzy on the specifics of the place (even though we passed by it a million times), but I do remember one eventful day at the Pop Stand. One of our Class of '64 members had an older brother who was working there (it's possible his family had some interest in the place). One Saturday, I'm guessing we were in 6th or maybe even 7th grade, we were roaming around in one of our street-walking bands and we ended up sitting around on the crates in the storage area while this older brother was waiting for business. It was a slow day and boys were just being boys. What I've never forgotten was how surprised I was by what his older brother told us that day.... the whole story of the birds and the bees straight from this teenager - the expert of Chili. Who knows what he told us and who knows if others were as naive as I was but I do remember hearing things I never imagined before were part of this world. After that our buddy had new status as the source for all such information.

At some point, probably related to the increased traffic volume from the new Bright Oaks neighborhood and the new houses being constructed off Chestnut Ridge Rd., the merge was changed and Chestnut Ridge was re-routed to Chili Ave through the current convenience store lot. Chili was growing fast in the 50's and 60's, as was all of Rochester and its surrounding towns. The days before the big increases in development were days that had some charm in their simplicity.

How Little We Knew Each Other

I have written before about how separate the boys and girls were in our elementary school classes but I thought I'd add a further note about that. The amazing thing about SPX school was how constant the group of students in a class was from year to year. Even as Chili went through the great post-war growth period (population of Chili: 1830 - 2010, 1940 - 3392, 1950 - 5283, 1960 - 11237, 1970 - 19609, 2010 - 28,625) our class of '64 seemed to change only by a couple of kids per year. So, we were pretty much a group of 40 or so kids who spent 180 days a year together for eight straight years. The thing that seems so strange and amazing to me now is that there are kids in that group I may never have said one word to in all that time. How could it have been that we didn't all become friends? Sure there were lots of kids who were friends with each other, but how is it that we might have been around the some kids so much and never been put in situations where we worked with them or played with them? It's true that it was a time before the "interactive classroom" and there just wasn't room for us to engage in any activities which required leaving our desks (except maybe individuals at the blackboard) but still, it says something about the philosophy of education at SPX, it was not about social interaction.

Maybe it was just me. Maybe the more extroverted kids knew and interacted with everyone more than I did. It is true that I was quiet and not very social myself so maybe I'm not remembering the way things really were. And it is true that in 7th and 8th grade there was more interaction (for me anyway) than before. But the bottom line is, I can think of several girls and a few boys from my SPX class with whom I may have never had a conversation in all the approximately (8 years x 180 days/year x 7 hours/day =) 10080 hours we spent together in the same classroom.

For me, this screams out for a class reunion, to make up for this crazy reality and maybe to say "Hi!" to people we were too young or too shy or just too goofy to appreciate at the time. On the other hand, I am not a reunion sort of guy. So maybe it's best to just say "Hi!" from this blog to ALL of you SPX 64 classmates along with a wish that we might just run into each other somewhere around town at some point.

Snow and Light

There are so many ways to enjoy snow and Rochester winters offer many of them. One of my personal favorites is to walk during a heavy snow just before or after daylight, dawn and dusk, when there is just enough light to see the distant features blurred by the snowfall. This week I experienced one of those morning walks. The house lights were on in most of the houses and the high schoolers were already unloading from their buses, but rush hour was not yet in motion and there was a quietness as the snow blanketed the roads and trees and ground as well as my coat and hood in whiteness. When I experience such things nowadays, my mind takes me back to one particular experience I had in the early 1960's, maybe 1964? I was walking home alone just as it was turning dark near where the path to the baseball field and sand hill veered off the recently extended Wilelen Road. There was a very heavy snow, so heavy that when you looked ahead all you saw was whiteness except for some lights in the houses. It was so quiet, so peaceful. It touched me for some reason in a very deep way. The snow was so heavy you could hardly make out the woods behind the houses or the field which was empty then but is now a fully developed neighborhood. It gave me a good feeling of individual existence like one might have on a mountain top. A happy memory of the beauty the winter offers and why it feels so good to be back where snowy winters are part of life.

Record Cold September 25, 1963

     I read yesterday that the record low temperature in Rochester for 25 September was 30 degrees in 1963. It made me think about afternoons after school on those (evidently chilly in Chili) autumn days. We were always out and about either at someone's house, maybe playing basketball, or just walking around in small groups with nowhere to go. This activity usually lasted from after school until dinner time which by October meant until it was getting dark. Memorably, for a boy in the SPX class of '64,  Fall 1963 was the first time that girls might have been included in our activities so there was a whole new (awkward) dimension beyond home court basketball games. It might even include "walking with a girl" (if the crowd dispersed in a certain way so only you two were left) and such walks might have produced first glimpses of a whole new world that was on the horizon. Although it is easy to recall some of the happy days of those times, I sure don't remember the record cold days.

Prime Rib

     You know you're back in Rochester when you go out to a family restaurant and you can order prime rib with a baked potato. It feels good to be back.

Past and Present

    Things we remember, positive or negative, don't exist anymore, and that's neither good nor bad.

  In  "Cold Mountain" Ruby reestablishes a relationship with her father who treated her terribly when she was little. They end up happy in the present rather than living by old resentments. She is able to forgive if not forget the past...to let it go... to let the present be instead of the no longer existent past.

 Sometimes we treat something that happened in the past as part of the present, when actually what happened, for better or worse, is no more. Be it a happy or sad event, a relationship that thrilled us or killed us, these things happened, they shaped us, and we went on. We don't have to forget them, they do exist as part of the past, we just need to give them their proper place. We are shaped by these things, these people, but we are also shaped by each choice we make today. Maybe the key to balance is to find the proper weight to assign to things past and present. When something in the present is part of a continuum it might merit significant weight. On the other hand, a singular past event might merit less.

 Maybe due to our moods or circumstances, we might sometimes give past events an overdue weight in the present, allowing them to dominate our present, when in reality, each day is new and we can, if we choose, relegate to yesterday what belongs to yesterday, both the best and the worst of times gone by. I don't mean to demean or trivialize the past, I just mean to say that given the very real finiteness of any lifetime, and the very real power that exists within all of us to continue to shape our own life, it seems only natural to not limit ourselves from experiencing freely the moments we have.

  And so it is with Chili in the mid 20th century. That Chili doesn't exist anymore. We who lived there then share many memories of those days, some good ones and some not so good. For me it is helpful to think about those days and how they helped shape us, along with our choices and and all the experiences we have had since then.

Laughter and Tears

     In a dream, Natasia Gracias kissed me on a river bank. She wore a black dress speckled with white polka dots or daisies or umbrellas... white against black. There was a reception in the background and she was one of three cousins attending. Her real first name was impossible to remember. There were laughter and tears.

Breaking Up

"Breaking up is hard to do". Neil Sedaka
"Breaking up is never easy I know". ABBA

     I was thinking about breakups. I've had a few going back to Chili days. I guess most people suffer them (or cause them) maybe multiple times and, yeah, usually they are hard on one or both parties in some way. But I have come to look at them differently lately. The thing is, when there is a breakup there is a choice by someone to go in another direction, for whatever reason. Isn't knowing the truth something we should be thankful for?  Who wants to pine for a relationship the other has discarded? So why hurt?
     Hurting over another's choice seems wasteful. We should feel grateful to know the truth and get on with living this new truth. Now there might be sadness in the breakup but isn't that better than living in a false relationship?  
     And breakups don't just happen between couples, they can happen between friends too. Again, they happen when something is not right enough for someone. In either case, one might be grateful they are still not in the middle of an unbalanced partnership.

     But what about relationships that don't break up? Again, there are several kinds. Some stay active forever. Some are less active due to circumstances but they stay alive nonetheless - there but for the circumstances of life.
      It seems a lot healthier to focus on the relationships that are alive. Instead of pining or being pined for, everyone is better off admitting that we are not good fits with everyone and to appreciate the relationships that we have that live on, be they daily or rarely active.
 
       As for all the grief and moping we ever might have caused or carried, here's to letting it go in gratitude that we either freed or were freed from a debilitating imbalance. (And that's not to say there might be good memories about the times when things were still in balance.)

When Did SPX School Open?

     It is always a treat to visit Rochester. This year I had a little excursion to Chili. I saw the burned out St. Pius X Church...a sad sight. One thing I noticed might come as a surprise to newcomers to SPX. There used to be a path that led from the school to Ranchmar. The kids who lived in Ranchmar used it to go home for lunch (while others had to eat at school) and everyone used it as the way to go to Ranchmar to play. Well, the path is gone! Beside the church there is now a parking lot and a field of grass that ends in a forest wall of trees. You would never know of the baseball fields that existed nor the short cut to Ranchmar. I guess we should all take pictures of everything because everything eventually will change.
     As for the school itself, I checked to see that the cornerstone was laid in 1959. Now September 1959 was the year the class of '64 would have entered 4th grade. Going into this trip I was almost sure we had come to the new school (from St Feehan's) at the start of 3rd grade because I have no memory of 3rd Grade at St Feehan's. However, two reliable members of the class of '66 assured me they went to the first grade at St Feehan's. Easy going guy that I am I might have taken their word for it except that while visiting a reliable source in Chili, this source being one of the founding members of St Pius X, she showed me a newspaper clipping from August 2, 1957 showing the removal of the stained glass windows of St Feehan's and saying that the new school would be open to one class in the fall of that year and would be open to five classes the following year! If that were true, we would have started at the new school in September 1958! With this hard evidence I had to believe my memory had been correct......but it was two against one and the '66ers were much more sure of their memories of being at St Feehan's in 1958-59 that I was in my lack of memory of  being there.
       So the mystery persists. Did one class open the school in 1957? When did all the classes move in? Comments are welcome and I guess history will have to abide by the majority vote (unless of course someone offers even better proof than I thought I had on the matter! -- a class picture perhaps?!).

Two More Poems

These two poems were composed in Cenci, Italy in 2001.
I share them here for all those we carry within us even though we don't see them anymore.


Separated by Time

You leave the nest to seek adventure in life,
Believing it is out there, in some other place.
If I were a bird, I'd sing, saluting your departure,
Your triumphant flight.
Then I would settle in my nest, and wait awhile.
In time, I would make the journey to your new land.
I would build a new nest, made of twigs and leaves familiar to you.
Then I would settle in my new nest, and wait awhile.
In time I would come to sing for you, to you; at dawn, at dusk.
Eventually you might recognize me
And I would offer to share my nest with you.



Separated by Space

If I were a bird, I would build a fine nest outside your home.
If you would allow me, I would build my nest from
     the feathers of your pillow,
     the threads of your clothes,
     the hair from your brush.
I would watch to see that you were safe and well and happy.
If you were, I'd sing for you.
If you were not, I'd come closer and sing for you.
I would use my wings to brush away any tears of sadness you cried.
And when you were gone, I'd set perch on your headstone;
Eternally.
Finally.

RIP Sister Walter Anne

  Last month I learned that Sister Walter Anne had recently died at 90+ years of age. Some folks who met with her last summer told me they had a wonderful visit remembering the early days of St. Pius X school. As far as I can recall she was the first principal of the school. By the time the class of '64 reached 8th grade she was no longer teaching but I think she was still the principal. I don't really have any personal memories of her, I just remember her tall presence in all the school activities during the first half the sixties. Maybe someone can add a comment if they have any warm memories.
   I know that schools no longer have the services of nuns for teaching like they did 50 years ago. I suppose we could have had more strictly trained teachers…but I'm not sure we could have had more dedicated or helpful teachers and therefore any better teachers. It's kind of amazing to think of these women, dedicating themselves to teaching children, without the distractions felt by so many elementary school teachers today.

New Blog -- Oriole Science Guy

Instead of mucking up the Chili site with my techie escapades, I'm going to write them on my new blog at Oriole Science Blog.

Hope this serves all interests :)

P.S. I'll be moving such blogs from this site to make it more single themed.