While sifting through stuff from way, way long ago, I found this from long ago. He kept it and the 1975 on the back is in his hand. When I was a very little girl and we went someplace, he would always say, “Hold my hand. Hold my hand. Always hold my hand.”

Der Bingle and his bear buddies – here’s one of them pictured below – are irate about what has happened in Minnesota.

What  happendc in Minnesota, you ask. Well, I will cite the Drudge Report link, but I am also going to show you the article right here.

ST. PAUL, Minn. — A sports bar owner in Minnesota is showing his support for the Green Bay Packers in this weekend’s game against the Chicago Bears in a very literal way — by roasting a bear.

Blake Montpetit, the co-owner of Tiffany Sports Lounge in St. Paul, says he plans to cook a 180-pound black bear in a pig-roaster over hickory and charcoal on Sunday. He says his cousin shot it in northern Wisconsin during bear hunting season, which runs in September and October, and then froze it.

Montpetit says he planned to serve the meat to customers, but the state health department rejected the plan because the meat is unprocessed. Instead, customers can take photos with the roasting bear.

After the game, the meat will go to his cousin’s party in Somerset, Wis.
Copyright 2011 by The Associated Press

This is just upsetting, dontcha know. And TwoMoo and her fellow Cheeseheads here share the outrage being experienced by our bear friends.

I didn’t get a picture of TwoMoo today because I forgot until I was in the car driving to Fort Wayne. Maybe tomorrow.

If you tend to go “eeeeewwwww” a lot, read no further. Do you know why? Well, of course you don’t . . . and I think I’m stalling here because this is definitely “eeeeewwww” stuff – maybe with even more e’s and w’s.

The other day I heard someone make sort of an obscene remark in frustration and I suddenly went one step beyond hearing it – I visualized it. It was awful; it was a big eeewwww. Now, I can’t stop doing it when I hear an off-color remark.

It gets worse. I got disgusted and uttered a yucky phrase myself and I momentarily saw the scenario that had been just words. It gets still worse. In my visualization there was a face that annoys me to no end – Michael Dukakis and then it switched to Joe Biden. Oh, yuck, yuck . . . as in major yuck.

It is a curse – a curse that comes from cursing. I suppose there is a lesson in that. What could it be? A picture is worth a thousand words??

Some of you may know the Ohio Redoubt of the West Facing Cave is a bear hangout. And, obviously, we have some cow friends here. Well, after all these years of rooting for the Bears, TwoMoo pointed out this morning that she was a Cheesehead – you know, the Wisconsin thing. (Even though I have it on good authority she has a “go to California and be a contented cow” fund.)

You may think you have seen TwoMoo, but you are thinking of Moo. I haven’t published a picture of TwoMoo yet, but I will tomorrow. Although perhaps with the Bears being irate, maybe she will enter the Witness Protection Program.

It was 1941 and my dad was in Gary to make money before finishing his schooling. He worked at one of the steel plants and he lived here. This is the address to which my grandmother mailed a letter in December of that year. I wrote about it in the post just below. Out of curiosity I looked it up on the Bing maps and here it is. Just a hop, not even add the skip and the jump from the Indiana Toll Road.

Of course, that road didn’t exist then – it was built when I was little and it went a bit north of my maternal grandparents’ house. The engineers rented a large room from my grandmother to serve as their field office. I used to ride my bike up to the overpass and watch the traffic go east and west. Just a rural girl leaning on the side rail – no need for chain link fencing then. I wanted to be in one of those cars. I actually did live in Sacramento for awhile, but I am back.

I lived in Palatine, Illinois also and Mother and Daddy drove over on that road and I drove to Scott on it. Not once did my father remark he had lived just that wee bit to the side.

I think it looked different then.

I belong to the early segment of Baby Boomers; we were lucky to have small town America mixed with the great spirits of the war being over. We were born knowing we had won. We reaped the benefits. My mother’s school was called into the gym on Monday, December 8,1941 to hear President Roosevelt’s speech. My father was driving back to Gary from having been in his hometown of Kingman, I don’t know who is was with, but I remember him saying he turned to the guy and said, “Well,  I guess we’ll be going soon.”

Six days later my grandmother mailed him a letter and in it you can hear the worry about the war and the tight times of The Great Depression. I think she had not yet grasped, however, just what a tremendous endeavor was looming.

Of course, he did go and he made his allotment out to her . . . and every time it came, she walked up to the bank and put it into an account for him  . . . for when he would come home. I once heard someone remark about still being able to see her making those regular trips.

I remember my dad teaching me to wash my hands; he taught my sons also. He was a big believer in not making yourself sick unnecessarily, and since he grew up before antibiotics, he wasn’t lackadaisical about it. I also brushed my teeth a lot too, but that is a different story in the same vein.

Anyway, I have always associated the aroma of soap with being protected, or watched over, or however you want to put it. Now I will get my hands filthy dirty right along with the best of them – including lying under my old MB300D fiddling with leaking lines and hoses. (May it rest in peace) However, when I go to get them clean, I want something that smells robust  . . . that takes five fingers and stamps C-L-E-A-N on them – and, yeah, the other hand too.

I do not use lavender scented soap by choice. And when it comes to scents like apple and strawberry . . . well, they’ll do in a pinch. Of course, you don’t get the psychic comfort out of the scent, but nothing’s perfect.

Two days ago I was in Wal-Mart to get softsoap refills and I saw there were some melon-scented bottles for 97¢. I figured at the rate we go through soap, I’d get a couple of bottles. Now I feel as if I have namby-pamby hands – the kind of hands that hang back when the slop jar spills.

Okay, we don’t have slop jars in my house now – but we have dogs and every now and then it gets a bit sloppy.

So I head for the serious stuff. Ironically, I don’t like the hand sanitizers. They smell like I’m going to have some medical procedure done; they don’t make me feel old-fashioned clean. My hair and the rest of my body can smell like apples or pomegranates, but darn it, I want my hands to radiate SOAP. It’s a quirk, I guess.

I don’t use bookmarks when I read and I don’t turn down pages because I never have. I have always been able to zone in on where I stopped reading. I have bought them for other people because of the appropriate message – for instance, right now there is one on the windowsill that pictures Maxine; I’m going to have to get a picture of it, but not now because that would involve getting up and taking three or four steps.

This sucks swamp water. I actually got up and went over to  get the bookmark because, hey, sometimes lazy just gets too darn embarrassing. It wasn’t there; I don’t remember picking it up and moving it, so, rats, maybe I am getting to the age when I need a bookmark. I did hit my head on the old Indian yoke my grandfather unearthed.

I came back and started writing the above paragraph and by the time I reached the final period, I had decided I needed a picture of the yoke. Eight steps over, eight steps back.

See, here it is. That’s Lydia, our piano player to the right (apparently she has taken off her trapper hat) and the Thomas Bickle light to the left.

But I was talking about bookmarks, and I had intended to say that I didn’t use bookmarks for books, nor on the computer. I do bookmark esoteric pages, such as “how to replace your power adapter chip”, but that is a stress I don’t need to remember here. However, my browser thinks it should remember sites I have been to and automatically offer up some choices when I venture into the address bar. Of the times I have scrolled down to click on where I want to go, a good percentage of those clicks have hit the address above or below . . . and I wind up where I don’t want to be. So, I went into my preferences – always a scary journey – and deleted some sites without deleting others.

This is no big deal, but you gotta remember, I am of the age when I have to learn to move beyond the eraser on the top of a pencil, which used to be my very best friend.

I could ramble on but Lydia is suggesting that I don’t . . . that I just scroll up to the sleep choice and click on it. Sometimes she treats me like I am such a child.

I’M DOING IT, LYDIA!!  . . . . Oh, was that a little temper tantrum reply?

My fellow Peanut Butter Cafe & Roadhousers are lined up like kids at Show & Tell. We each have picked out stuff for the scanner and then the blog and we are jumping up and down, yelling, “Me! Me! Pick me!” Today we’re going to show what Moo has found. You remember Moo –

She chose something from Chi-town – one of our favorite places.

I’m here, sort of late, typing – and my right index finger has a paper cut on it – because, oh, I don’t know, I guess I think AmeliaJake has to  check in.to say, Yo, I’m still here. Me. I know I posted earlier, but that was of things I came across. For some reason, I need to tell you that my pals here at the Peanut Butter Cafe & Roadhouse had stuff spread out over the tables. We were playing the jukebox and sipping drinks with crushed ice and reaching in a grab bag full of surprises.

We talked it over and decided we’d be posting a lot of it for the sake of family and because some of the stuff is just plain interesting – a peek back into the 20’s and 30’s and 40’s. And this was just one box. We have more. We found relatively ancient pictures of ballplayers that were cut out of the back of cereal boxes. I kid you not. We found basketball schedules and poems and birthday cards and a letter written on V-J Day.

We found the program from my dad’s graduation from college after the war. Have we got stuff! And we are loving it.

I just wanted to say that in my AmeliaJake way, and not get too caught up in just reporting and posting. For some reason, all this old stuff makes me feel my life so strongly – that it is real. It’s kind of like when my father-in-law died and a fellow wrote to tell his sons about when they played football in the early 40’s. Every now and then, out of the blue, I will remember the sentence about my father-in-law getting up after a rough and tumble play with a big smile on his face.* I can see it. It exists in how we cite someone’s signature quote and then grin: My father’s “He can’t sing like he used to” ** and my father-in-law’s “Count old Kook out.” Hmmm . . .  have I told you that story? Oh well, some time soon.

* Football story:

My best recollection of Bill Vance was in 1941;we we were at
Carthage High;Bill was a sophomore and I, a senior & on the
varsity football–Bill played guard and I, tackle. Bill
being two years younger and smaller played only parttime.
When Bill was in the game he played long side of me. When
a running play was over our side, I would say “Come on Bill.”
We opened holes many times for the running back to make a
good gain. Oftentimes when we were unscrambling from a
pile-up, Bill’s helmut (being too large) would be half
turned on his head and I could only see a big smile on his
face. Yes, Bill was “tough and scrappy” which he had to use
too many times during his life.
Yes, I am proud to have been his cousin. May his soul rest in
peace.

** My dad always punctuated any Bing Crosby song with the comment, “He can’t sing like he used to.”