July 2024 – Everydave Life

July 26, 2024

Flashback Foto Friday Fun?

This week I give a tip of the hat to Keith, The Nostalgic Italian. If you read my music blog, you probably know his name by now as he’s often contributed guest articles…which he’s well-suited to do since he worked in radio for years. But his own site covers a range of topics that go well beyond music. One he’s been doing lately is a “Flashback Friday Photo” segment, and I figured it’s a good idea so I will do that today.

Photos are one of the biggest ironies in my life as I come to think about it. Both my parents liked photography. My dad had a Nikkormat SLR when I was a kid and would take it along on our trips. Mom was more an instant photo type, who also became the family “super 8” videographer in the ’70s when it seems every family had one of those portable movie cameras. It didn’t take me long as a kid to take after them, and by the time I was perhaps 6, I had a Kodak Instamatic box camera, I loved shooting pictures on vacation. Before long I’d “graduated” to an Olympus Trip point & shoot 35mm camera and by the time I was well into high school I had an SLR (the bigger cameras you can change lenses on). Working university summers at a conservation agency, one of my main “chores” was to document the parks… if nothing else was happening, there’s a decent chance I’d just be off to one of the local areas, photographing either events going on or else the landscape, the flowers, wildlife if I could snap them. It wasn’t too many years after that I ended up, almost randomly, working in a mall camera shop with one-hour photo lab and would end up spending nearly twenty years working in camera stores and photo labs, often doing a little freelance work on the side with my own gear.

So, you’d expect I’d have box after box of photos, albums, negatives and such, wouldn’t you?

Instead, the opposite seems the case. Most of my pre-2008 photos were lost, rather through my own stupidity. Story for another day, that. But some were held onto… and a number of those ended up at my dad’s place. He had a basement and garage for storage, I didn’t. Alas, pop passed away suddenly a few years ago and his house was cleaned out to allow for it to be sold very quickly and I wasn’t able to retrieve any (allegedly the people doing so couldn’t find any of my boxes nor photo albums of my dad’s pictures, of which I would guess there were a lot.) Anyhow, all that means that I don’t have nearly as many pictures of my youth and young adulthood as I have memories of those images, let alone the times themselves! Yet, somehow a few got moved along with me and to start today, one I discovered recently that I’d saved from a previous computer on a jump drive. I’d scanned it years ago, though not nearly as many years ago as when the picture was taken.

The pic above is of my older brother Rick (back) and myself when we were – obviously – kids, I probably was three, maybe four at the time? Anyhow, it brings back some good memories to me and probably shows a few common things from many people’s days back in the early-’70s.

It was taken in the living room of the house I grew up in, a nice suburban bungalow that would be tiny by most of today’s home standards but was comfy and had a lot that was big, by today’s standards. I think it was 110 feet deep, and there was a park behind us. The window in the picture though, looked out on the front, and you can see a lot of vegetation and clearly, a birch tree’s white trunk. We had a number of trees, and that meant we had a number of birds. If it had been winter there’d probably have been a feeder close to that window and hours sitting there, watching the various chickadees, Cardinals and Blue Jays come and go was probably significant in developing my love of nature.

That part of the room looks pretty sedate, but check out the orange-colored window frames. My family loved color when I was young, and I wish I had photos of the rest of the room. There was a kind of velour-fabric yellow sofa and love seat, a very cool lounge chair – also yellowish fabric – that dad and I both loved, a bright orange wall, and a back wall that was velvet red-and-gold wallpaper that, looking now, probably was close to matching that Persian style rug in this photo. And a huge built-in bookcase. My dad and mom both read a lot and put a big emphasis on having me do the same as a kid, something I’m grateful for to this day.

Anyway, back to the photo. There’s some kind of wooden console or something behind us which seemed to have our LPS lined up in it. I don’t honestly remember that, but I do remember when I was really young, there was a big, long console stereo, also wood; one where you’d lift the top and there was a record player (and I assume a stereo too) inside.

As for us kids, thankfully I was dressed pretty normally in it! My mom eschewed jeans (I had to be about 14 and working an after-school part time job to start buying some for myself) and though she allowed cords for me (quite in vogue back then I think), she also loved things liked striped pants and Robin Hood-style vests for me and, if she could persuade him to wear them, my brother.

Obviously, we were playing with Hot Wheels. Obviously at least to those of us our age. The little cars are still made and popular, though I don’t know if they still make the track and accessories. The orange lines were track for the Hot Wheels, you could set it up from a high spot and race the cars down. They even made banked curves and things so you could get very elaborate with the layouts! I have absolutely no idea what it is we are running the track through here. It was easy to put up or dissemble.

I had two Hot Wheels in my hands, but alas, the picture isn’t sharp enough to see which they were. My brother was a more typical boy I guess, he’d throw his cars around, take them to school and race them off who knows what, and they got beat up. I on the other hand was fairly good at keeping them pristine. This came to be very fortuitous later on. I somehow saved a case with 24 of them into my adulthood, and I loved looking at them – they were cool designs. Some were realistic little models of real cars – I had a silver Mustang, a little red VW van with surf boards attached no less, a “souped up” Brinks truck and so on – but many were wild, futuristic looking designs like this Twin Mill of someone else’s.

Anyhow, amazingly I was far from the only one nostalgic for those old Hot Wheels. There was quite a collector’s market for them around early in the 2000s, and though I loved the cars, I decided to sell a number of them. Being in very good condition, they paid a surprising number of bills for me when times were a bit tough and financed a chunk of some time I spent in Atlanta. Most got me over $100 on e-bay; I think a couple went for at least $400. I spent a lot of time tearing apart other boxes of old belongings when I looked at a price guide (yes, there was one of those!) and found two that I had owned – top fuel dragsters – were valued in the four-digit price range. Unfortunately, I never did find those.

It was a good time by and large, even though I was often sick when I was that age. I spent a lot of time listening to music, even then, and reading, but my main toys were the Hot Wheels, model trains and Lego. I loved Lego too, I had big boxes and would make various houses of them. Back when Lego was just assorted blocks, windows, doors and things and you used your imagination to build with them rather than buy a kit and follow the instructions to build what Lego has decided you shall build, as we have now.

There was no internet, no video games, probably no more than 10 TV stations we could view and if the weather was nice, we’d probably be outside playing or riding bikes. Personally I wouldn’t trade that kind of childhood for today’s kids’ experiences in front of screens all day for … a box of old Hot Wheels!

July 19, 2024

A Limey In Las Vegas? Fry Traverses The U.S.A.

I like travelogue books, particularly those with a sense of humor…Bill Bryson’s made a pretty good career out of just that. So I was particularly curious to read Stephen Fry‘s In America, which I finished recently. Mind you, it was published in 2008; I just hadn’t heard of it and by and large hadn’t heard of him before .

Fry’s a middle-aged British comic who decided to come to the U.S. to visit all 50 states and film it for a British TV show. The book outlines his adventures, most of them occurring in places he got to by driving an authentic London cab around… which doubtless drew a lot of odd stares on the highways! So, starting in a Maine lobster-fishing port in fall, he worked his way up and down and around the land, ending months later at the fish market in Seattle before flying to Alaska then Hawaii.

It’s an interesting read because he not only sees a lot of the quintessential American places and tourist attractions – the Gateway Arch, Mount Rushmore, the National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia, Arches monument, the Golden Gate Bridge and so on – but also because he talks to a lot of ordinary Americans. Making it all the more interesting is, obviously, he’s a foreigner so we see the country through outside eyes. This is something I can relate to, being a Canadian by birth, but the differences between home countries is greater when there’s that ocean between them. For example, probably nothing surprises him more than college football … or rather the religious fervor fans view the sport with (which was eye-opening for me too when I first spent time in Georgia). He attends an Auburn – University of Alabama game and gapes in wonder at being almost unable to drive to the stadium because of all the tailgaters… six hours before the game started! “It is like some vast refugee camp. A refugee camp where everyone has beer, food, television, electric light, a sound system, barbeque sauce and (of course) more beer.” He’s floored by the beauty of the Utah Arches and desert scenery (“nowhere on earth looks anything like this”) but appalled by … well some things that are tough for most to take, like the homeless problem in so many cities. He loves a junior rodeo in Oklahoma but hated Waikiki Beach in Hawaii, but found solace there by hanging around with singer Jack Johnson’s wife on a more remote part of the island hearing about a school she helps run there. He enjoys a visit to the Ben & Jerry’s plant in Vermont; all the more when they let him blend some of his own ice cream.

Also high on his list of things he did not like was Atlantic City. This makes for some historically fascinating perspective; nothing there bothers him more than Donald Trump, his omnipresent appearance in the city and his casinos. Recall this was 2008… long before Trump the businessman became Trump the presidential candidate. He suggests whipping him with scorpions for the tawdry buildings he’s put up and for taking the name of “priceless mausaleum of Agra, one of the beauties and wonders of the world” and applying it to his gaudy, tacky casino – the Trump Taj Mahal. You can be a fan of President Trump or a foe but either way, it made an interesting couple of pages getting the perspective of an outsider about him when he was just a rich, loud executive and reality TV show face.

Fry was perpetually disappointed with the homogenization of American cities – the same fast food drive-thrus, Gap and Target stores and uniform strip malls from coast to coast – which I think is a sentiment quite a few Americans share. Thus he loved Asheville, a city with lots of small shops and not so many national outlets; loved the fish market in Seattle ( one place where he could find “real” bread and cheese, not to mention fresh seafood) but didn’t care much for the rest of the city, home of blustering American icons Microsoft and Starbucks. Yes, Fry could be a wee bit condescending at times, and was almost unabashedly politically correct, which becomes tedious in a few spots. He’s appears appalled that there are a couple of older Black ladies working for a White woman at an estate he visits in Georgia but more appalled that they – the staff ladies – seemed happy to be there. I say “almost unabashedly politically correct” though, since he does refer to northern Natives as “Eskimoes”… and sneers at those who try to use other terminology. He says ones he’s met describe themselves as “Eskimo” so why should he differ?

He is baffled by the religiosity of the masses, mocks people who believe in Sasquatches, doesn’t like the diet of most Americans and finds the cities largely bland and lacking character. However…and this is a big “but” … he also mentions that most of the Americans he met coast to coast were friendly, had genuine smiles and were welcoming to strangers, more than he’s experienced in his own land. That made him love the country far more than when he began his journey. Which is a pretty good final impression for any country to leave with a visitor.

July 10, 2024

An Acquired Taste I Was Born With

It’s been a bit of a long time since checking in here, so I figured it would be a great week to look at John, from the Sound of One Hand Typing‘s weekly writing prompts. One interesting one he had this week was to list foods you like but everyone else seems to hate. It didn’t take me long to think of one… or several actually. I guess my tastes are quite different than most people’s.

By and large I think two things stand out with me and my food/beverage tastes. One, compared to the Average Joe or Joanne, I’m not much into “sweets”. And two, I do quite like many things people find too bitter or spicy hot to be “palatable”.

The former isn’t an absolute. I do like most fruits for example – berries, pineapple, apples and so on – but that’s about as far that direction as I can happily veer. Once in awhile I might get a minor craving for vanilla ice cream or chocolate bars, but typically when I do, I have those with a cup of strong coffee to nullify some of that sweetness. Candy is just something I buy to make my wife smile. Similarly, I don’t much like pop, or as most call it down here “soda”. It’s odd maybe, because when I was a small kid, I loved Pepsi, Dr. Pepper (which is I think the “state drink” here), even sickly orange pop. Mind you, my mom watched my diet very closely as a small child so it was a rare treat for me to be allowed it back then. Nowadays I maybe will have one can or glass of pop every couple of months. The only exceptions are things like occasional European sodas that have about half the sugar and much less carbonization than the American ones, or real ginger ale (usually Jamaican) with the real, very spicy ginger dominating the taste palette. On the other hand, I do like beer. It’s not a drink I choose just to drink, or to be “manly”, I like the taste… particularly the more robust ones – IPAs, Porters and the like.

That ties into the second point. I seem to like very strong flavors. I’ve come to realize that’s because my actual sense of taste isn’t all that acute. My sweetie suggests I can’t smell a thing, and since smell is tied into taste, I can probably taste far less than most. Hence, something needs to be strong for me to really taste it. It got worse with the first bout of Covid I suffered through; for a few days I couldn’t even taste coffee. It was just hot water, no matter how strong it was brewed. In some weeks time, that sense came back, but it seems not to where it was before. Hence my tendency to pour hot sauce on, well some would say as in that Frank’s ad, pretty much everything.

I don’t worry excessively about it. It is what it is and I would be infinitely more concerned if my eyesight or hearing was as deficient as my sense of smell/taste. As it is, there are some advantages – if I open the garbage can the day before pickup day in the summer, I can smell it and don’t love it… but I don’t literally gag like some others. I can drive by a poor dead skunk and not be the wiser unless I see it’s body on the roadside. On the other hand, if someone says “does it smell like something’s burning”, I worry because unless it’s the Towering Inferno and I’m in it, I probably couldn’t tell if it did or not.

So with all that considered, which foods do I like that most don’t. I think it comes down to three, all green and weirdly, all quite healthy – peas, asparagus and most of all, Brussel Sprouts. I was the odd duck child who actually liked the Brussel Sprouts we’d have with Thanksgiving or Christmas dinners while others discretely avoided them, or if they had to face them, smothered them in gravy and butter; I devoured them. I still do when I get the chance. I like that flavor, I like their size and that they’re easy to cut, I even like that there’s something inherently organic and healthy looking about them. I’d probably buy and eat them a lot more if others around me shared my love of them… my sweetie thinks they’re OK, basically, most of the rest around here seem to hear “Brussel Sprouts” and think “I think we have to go out and get some fast food!”

Brussel Sprouts… if you had no sense of taste, you’d love ’em too!