F16’s Don’t Kill People, 500 Lb. Bombs Kill People

The very worst job I ever had was working at the Newsstand in Harvard Square. This morning I read that it is going to close and really, the only thought I could summon was, "good."

Oh, I understand-people love the place. Yeah, it’s an institution, I get that. But I still can’t un-do the months of hell that was working there before I finally turned in my name badge and left to get a "real" job. OK, that’s not true-I left for a job supervising telemarketers…but still.

It’s been many, many years so I guess it is OK to finally tell the story about how that bat-shit crazy manager had us polishing packages of candy and gum with paper towels and a bottle of Windex. Yeah, you read that right-Windex. You see, no one bought the candy and gum on the displays. Sometimes the homeless guy who was camped out across the street would come in and steal some while we all pretended not to see, but no one else was going to touch Clark bars that were still there collecting dust long after they stopped making them. Naturally, the wrappers got a little dusty and then over time, grimy-so out came the Windex and paper towels. That was my job-making the Doublemint sparkle-look, no streaks!

The customers were great too. At least a couple times a week I’d have someone come in and ask how to get to Harvard (study!), or where the "glass flowers" museum was (The Peabody, and they weren’t exactly flowers…I think "weeds" might have been more accurate. I always wondered how disappointed people were when they went to see the exhibit and realised they were very exacting botanical reproductions made of glass that all looked like shit you’d pull out of your plant beddings?). Then, there were the flat-out crazies like the woman who insisted I was giving her the evil eye and wanted me to "Change my face." Every single day was a parade of insanity from the guy that would buy three boxes of Tic Tacs every morning and then go out by the subway entrance and spit them out in a patterns to read his fortune like an I-Ching, to the embarrassed middle aged men tying their best to purchase their pornography from anyone but me (which really, if you’re buying something called "Barely Legal" you damn well ought to be embarrassed whether you are buying it from a woman or not).

Now, I’d like to go on record as saying I did not glue the newsstand shut, nor do I know who did it. I have a pretty good idea who did it, but it wasn’t I. I believe it happened a few times-two that I can remember for certain. I worked the early morning shift and remember waiting outside for Fred to show up with the key and then he realised someone had filled the lock with super-glue. We couldn’t laugh (aloud anyway) and when it became apparent that we’d have to wait for a locksmith, everyone (except Fred) went over to The Tasty and fell apart laughing. The second time was even better, though we got the hell out of there fast because we knew what was coming. I swear to God, I really don’t know who did it, but I admit to deriving a great deal of joy from it-so thank you, whoever you were with the super-glue. Thank you.

In a way, I’m glad I had the experience of working there, even though I hated working there-if that makes any sense. For every lunatic I had to deal with, there were really lovely people that made me look forward to getting out of bed each cold morning and getting to Harvard Square before the sun was up. Back then, certain sections of The New York Times came in early and it was always the same people showing up to get them. We’d hold copies for some people every week. It was interesting how the more "important" the person was in status, the better they treated the employees. While there were plenty of "new rich" assholes that felt justified treating employees as subhuman, I never experienced that from politicians, professors, or writers-and we saw quite a few of them. It was a good place to work as a young person, if for no other reason than seeing the difference between being dignified and a douchebag.

It was a good thing I quit when I did or I might have gained fifty pounds from my almost daily lunch of Brie with apples on a baguette from the deli/cheese shop across the street. The counterman liked me because I didn’t make him cut the rind off my cheese and I would hold magazines for him until he got paid. He made really generous sandwiches that often fed a couple co-workers as well (except one kid who called it "scary cheese", and couldn’t be persuaded to try it). I am actually feeling a weak, kind of sad wave come over me thinking about those sandwiches because no cheese and apples on French bread will ever taste as good as those did in a cold, damp autumn day in Harvard Square sitting atop a bundle of newspapers eating lunch. Except, I never got to finish lunch, because bat-shit-crazy manager would always come screaming up to you with some life or death situation that involved driving to the office down the street or polishing packages of chewing gum.

Yes, so it is the end of an era, as people like to say. A bit sad but hardly mournful. All the interesting places in Cambridge disappeared long ago, with Central Square meeting a similar fate. I guess I miss the Communist bookstore more than I’d ever miss Out Of Town News, but then, I never worked there or I might feel differently.

I was fortunate to spend the best years of my life in Boston/Cambridge at a time when rent was cheap, the city was safe and there were still some unique qualities to make it different from other American cities. Boston/Cambridge is really quite small and though people don’t like to admit it, provincial. You can’t ride the T without meeting someone you know, and years later in the course of conversation it sometimes comes up that I know the same people as my husband independently. That is not at all an unusual occurrence, particularly if you’ve worked in a place like Out Of Town News, as your circle tends to widen and include people that might not otherwise find their way into your life. Again, it was a good experience at the right time, but damnit, I sure hated working there.

And Richard H, if you’re reading this I hope you get in touch, I miss you.

I’m totally beat-and I don’t mean Leroy Jones.

I’ve been canning for the past couple days which would be a bad idea with my neck/shoulder screwed up from the injured disk, but then I went and made apple butter. I don’t even like apple butter, though just about everyone I know does. It was much more work than anticipated. With jam, you chop your fruit, shove it in a pot and stir it once in a while until it gels. With butters, you peel 24 apples, chop them, simmer them, put them through a food mill and then stand on your feet a couple more hours stirring constantly until it thickens enough to stuff in jars and process. Four hours total-on my feet using my bad arm.

Thankfully, it is really good apple butter. The mincemeat I made yesterday isn’t half bad either.

Danny’s costume is completed (pictures to follow Halloween), and I have a pint of boiled cider sitting in the fridge just waiting for me to make some doughnuts. As I type, I can hear the jars of apple butter going "ping" in the next room indicating a good seal. I’m listening for one more ping.

I’m so glad we live waaaaaaay down a long scary road in the country and don’t get trick-or-treaters because I sort of neglected to buy or make any candy! No one ever comes here anyway. We’re a few miles outside of town, which is where we’ll be taking Danny tomorrow. I know he’s going to bolt awake at five AM and want to put his costume on and go. Isn’t waiting all day to go trick or treating just agony when you’re a kid? I can remember sitting in school eating some lame cupcakes and just wanting to go hit the house that always gave out full-sized Butterfinger bars. That was pretty generous, even for the 1970’s. My school would have this Halloween festival the Saturday before, called (I’m not making this up) "The Halloweenie." Worse, I think they actually did serve hot dogs. I never won any good prizes, but my sister did manage to win me a goldfish one year doing that game where you toss rings on pop bottles. Another year I came home with one of those lamps that had a laminated plastic tube that had coloured cut-out shapes and would spin around making psychedelic designs on your wall. I think it eventually melted. I have a vague memory of naked troll dolls that would probably be considered obscene today (they were trolls for fuck’s sake-it’s not like they had genetalia).

Every year my mother sent me out dressed as an Indian. Indigenous North American-not Gandhi, though that would have been totally awesome if she’d thought of it. No, my mother, ignoring the fact that we lived less than a mile from an Indian Relocation centre where they practically kidnapped people off their land and dumped them in the city to train them for menial jobs, sent me out with my face painted, hair braided and wearing a ridiculous fringed dress. And the feathered headdress that seemed to lose a couple feathers a year until it was just a headband. I must have worn that costume from first to fourth grade. Considering you had Native Americans threatening to blow up Mount Rushmore around that time, and AIM was becoming a household name, even at ten I knew it was a bad idea to be dressing up as Pocahontas. Really, it’s just a miracle I never got my ass kicked.

So one year, my sister and her friends pleaded with my parents to let them go out alone after dark to trick or treat. I was all finished by that point, happily munching away at my full-sized Butterfinger and starring at my trippy lamp, but my sister wanted to go out without her little sister tagging along. So of course, my parents caved and off they went. They got a couple of blocks over before running into a group of teenaged boys…dressed as Nazis. Of course they freaked out and ran home begging my dad to do something about it. I mean, come on-what was he supposed to do? Tell them it was tasteless? Honestly, it was hilarious given that it turned out to be Jewish kids doing it. They probably sat down and thought, "What’s the single most offensive thing we can do to shock our parents?" and came up Nazi. They weren’t glamourising Nazis, they were being rebellious teenagers. Brilliant.

Finally, my poor dad got stuck accompanying a group of middle school girls trick or treating and they never did run into the SS again. I can’t remember if he got any candy out of being dragged through the neighbourhood looking for Nazis, but I hope they at least tossed him a Hershey bar or two for his trouble.

So, what are you dressing as this year? I’m going as a middle-aged homemaker.

Happy Halloween.

I haven’t thought about those boxes of slides in years, but reading of the almost certain demise of Kodachrome makes me sort of wish I’d shot more. I admit to being a nostalgic sort of person that still has an old Underwood typewriter, a Victrola, and a radio from the 1940’s sitting in my front room-I like keeping these relics around. I’m not a hoarder (thank God, I don’t know how people live like that) but I find it difficult to let go of things that are no longer in production. I don’t save bits of string, or rubber bands, but I do save old blotters (usually with neat printed advertising on the back as they used to give them away) because fast-drying ballpoints made them obsolete. Sometimes the demise things make no sense-I collect egg cups because you cannot find them new-you can’t, I’ve tried. I don’t know what people do with their soft-boiled eggs these days, but apparently, they aren’t lopping the tops off the shells and eating them balanced in cups.  Now Kodachrome is disappearing. I feel like I’ve perhaps outlived my usefulness as well.

Here’s where I rant like the old person I apparently am, though I swear I didn’t notice it happening until I was screaming at kids to get off my lawn (no, not really-at least not yet). You know how the rant goes:

"That’s noise, not music."

"If her skirt were any shorter, we’d be seeing what she ate for breakfast!"

"Well, when I was your age…"

"Hey, who wants to look at slides from my holiday in the Bahamas?"

Dear God, I’ve turned into Andy Rooney.

"Well…well why do you suppose that is?" (That was my Andy Rooney impersonation-it’s better in person).

It’s strange, but I just want to sit down and cry over the stupid colour film, and the boxes of slides I’ll probably never look at again. I know, you can shoot a gazillion digital photographs to document every second of your child’s life with the advances in technology today. It’s true, I never would have been able to afford all those pictures were they being printed off by a lab. Still, they don’t look the same. I can look at Kodachromes from my childhood and the colour of my raw-silk blanket will still look as silvery-white and turquoise blue as it did in 1968. Somewhere, Kodachrome documented my sister’s first experience with a product known as Sun-In*-do you think digital would capture the subtle chartreuse shade of her hair after a couple applications of that stuff?  That’s the beauty of Kodachrome, and you just don’t get that with digital. You don’t get the light hitting just-so off the soft folds of a blanket, or a bad first experience with peroxide. With digital, you fix it after the fact to look like you remembered it (at least, that’s how it works around here-you may have a better camera and more talent).

So sad.

*Sun-In was a close relative of a product known as "Quick Tan" that turned your skin carrot orange to match the lovely green of your hair. Thus, many a girl spent her summer looking for all the world like a carrot, greens still attached. Not that I ever did that, because I had an older sister to try it out first.

Marie Claire magazine ranked Milwaukee the "sexiest city" in the U.S.  I have to wonder, did they actually go to Milwaukee to decide this?

You know, I’ve been to Summerfest (and German Fest, and Festa Italiana, and all the other ‘fests" the city holds at their lovely riverfront venue) and all I’ve ever noticed were great big guys named Hans, or Dieter with pasty white legs sticking out of ill-fitting shorts with the physique of a Far Side cartoon. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a great big guy named Hans or Dieter with pasty white legs and the physique of a Far Side cartoon (hey, who am I to judge?) but that’s not sexy-at least not to the non-Bohemian population (and I don’t mean beatnik when I say Bohemian. I mean, schnitzel and spatezel huffin’ Bohemians or what my old man liked to call "Swiss Hillbillies" (caution-they really hate that expression).

One of my favourite "festival" stories from Milwaukee (I actually have a few) took place at German Fest. My dad was in the food distribution business and one of his accounts had a booth at German Fest. Sometimes I’d go with him for the drive up from Illinois to make the delivery. The park wasn’t yet open to the public and stands were being set up when I noticed a number of signs out of public view but visible to workers behind various booths:

Human Waste Disposal Site

Oh, ewww. Since it wasn’t the bathroom and it was a festival known for encouraging binge drinking the human waste was obviously puke. Apparently it was enough of a problem that there were multiple locations to dispose of it. How’s that for sexy? God, that’s hot.

Oh, Hans!

Well, it has been a good forty years since old Zippy had a bath. He’d been packed away in a box with some of my other old pals and I thought it high time he was handed-down for someone else to love. Except, I don’t think Danny loves him. He thinks he’s kind of creepy. He has a cute yellow t-shirt that reads: ZIP, and has red corduroy overalls-but I still don’t think my kid is buying it. He’s already been acquainted with the concept that there was a monkey named Zippy through the Golden Books I gave him (Zippy was quite the popular guy back then) but my sense is that Danny is keeping his distance from the creepy chimp.

I also gave Toronto the dog a bath. I never was sure why he was named "Toronto" until I read the label today and well, he’s from Toronto! Perhaps my father was right insisting I was a waste of a college education. Toronto, who’d have imagined?

Mrs. Beasley got a bath today as well. I never really cared for her, but she was a gift from my grandmother and I guess I felt obligated to keep her all these years. I remember the evening I got her.

My grandmother (may she rest in peace) wasn’t the cookie-baking-warm, loving kind of grandmother, and she almost never gave gifts (unless you could count the grocery bags filled with sugar packets that she pilfered from lunch counters across the city and would then present you with like it was treasure). Getting a doll from her was special, even if it was a creepy old lady doll in a polka dotted dress. Mrs. Beasley got popular because Buffy on Family Affair had one. I doubt very much that my granny was aware of this. I still suspect someone gave it to her to give to me, but maybe I’m being unfair and she had some moment of feeling kindly and wanted to buy me a doll…wait, no. This is the lady that would give you a broken compact (complete with cracked mirror) to play with. Someone must have given it to her. Anyway, I ended-up with it one evening when we went out to dinner.

I remember the place because it was particularly nice and although it was only about a block away from where we lived (and yes, we probably drove there) we almost never dined at the place. It must have been a special occasion, though it was only my parents and I (don’t know where my sister was). In what I always thought was a terrible business decision, the place changed owners in the late 1970’s and became a barbecue joint-directly across the street from a synagogue. It was a reform temple, but still.  I always wondered what sort of banker would loan businessman money to open a rib joint across from Temple Judea?

So we were sitting in The Prime Rib (before it became, barbecued ribs) in those dark, leather-curved booths that were probably really elegant in 1950 when it opened. As I recall it was a really classy place with a bar. My dad would often order a drink in classy places like that because you’d get a funny look from the waiter if you didn’t. I’m sure it was a scotch and soda and I’m sure it was only one that he probably didn’t even finish. I seem to remember one of those bottles of Chianti with a candle burning in it too, but that was a pretty popular effect in those days. I just cringe thinking of the carbon-footprint all those candles in bottles and glass jars on restaurant tables caused over the years (someone should research that).

Right. So granny opens her big purse and pulls out Mrs. Beasley and I have to admit, I was shocked. At nine I was already a bit old for that sort of thing, but good God, she’d actually given me a gift that wasn’t a check in a cheap birthday card that I had to go to her house to get (she couldn’t cough-up postage, you know). The more I think about it, maybe she was sick or something and thought she was going to die and wanted to get right with God by giving her youngest grandchild a doll? I ‘ve searched my memory for some other explanation and I keep coming up with nothing. Usually, I don’t try to second-guess people’s intentions because most of the time there wasn’t an agenda to begin with-but that lady was calculated. Granny didn’t do things, "because."

No matter, I packed Mrs. Beasley away with Zippy and other animals and promptly forgot about them until this morning when I was poking around upstairs looking for something else. As I removed Zippy’s overalls I saw where my mother had pinned him back together with very un-safe looking safety pins that would likely be a source of immediate tetanus should I prick my finger on them. It was strange, looking at that and knowing exactly what must have happened (I busted the straps) and what she must have thought ("I’ll just pin them for now and fix them later") and what happened (Forty years went by without anyone noticing the pins).

I hope Danny enjoys his new friends, but I have to remember to warn him not to suck the monkey’s thumb in bed at night (I was ordered to stop sucking mine, but no one said anything about Zippy’s) because God only knows what those rubberised thumbs were made of.

Aren’t you glad you just wasted five minutes reading this instead of five minutes reading about Hillary Clinton?

It’s strange: I’m not even close to being what people would describe as a nostalgic sort of person, but the last few weeks have been drawing me back into times and places whether I enjoy it or not. Really, I’m rather not enjoying it.

At first I thought perhaps it was the change of season, and the coming holidays-you know, watching my son as I was at that age. That’s probably rubbish though as holidays at our house were anything but joyous and I doubt I was too excited by the change of weather (in Chicago?  Oh my gosh, no one looks forward to that).

Then, I started blaming the Old cooking magazines I bought at the library sale-looking at all those advertisements from 1972 must have been bringing back memories of home baked cookies and….well wait, that never happened either. Still, every time I pause I’m struck (in the almost physical sense of the word-assaulted even) by some thing that reminds me of some thing and before you can say skinless chicken stewed in a bottle of V-8 juice-I’m back in my mother’s bright orange kitchen with the gigantic flowers painted on one wall trying to gag down another forkful of courgettes cooked beyond recognition. It’s not like she did it deliberately (at least I don’t think she did). I’m sure some woman’s magazine put the idea in her head and it somehow didn’t match her skill level and well, you know. I still don’t believe (as some will argue) that she woke each morning looking for something positively disgusting to feed us. Anyway, I’ve been spending quite a bit of time in that kitchen lately and though no one is pushing overcooked vegetables on me, I’ve been surprised to find myself remembering where we kept the spices, the good dishes, and the oven mitts. It’s creepy, actually. Do I really need to remember that we kept the boxes of cereal in the cabinet over the stove in 1971? That the chewable vitamins were in the cabinet over the sink? That we had a big portable dishwasher that made it impossible to hear on the telephone when it was running-yet we still kept the phone right next to it? I don’t need to remember this stuff out of the blue, completely unprovoked-I don’t ever need to remember it really. As I said, I’m not a nostalgic, sentimental sort and even if I were, it’s questionable that knowing where the chewable vitamins were three decades ago is ever going to be information I need again.

Still, here I am with memories of a crummy upstairs bathroom that would leak water downstairs over the back door.

I’ve been ill this past year, though I don’t blog about it much (I mean really, what could I possibly find to say about it other than, "Oh my gosh, I’m going to throw up again"). Sometimes, I get these ideas that I can eat things that were I in the most stellar of health, I probably wouldn’t consume. You know, things like a Crown Jewels Cake, Tuna Pate, or in today’s example of poor judgment- a "beef stick."

Let me clue the uninitiated in here: a "beef stick", is sort of like beef jerky, but thicker and less dry. It still has the squishy fat and in the case of the thing I bought today-a good amount of gristle. I’ve never really understood the appeal of these things, seeing how we’re not exactly living in pioneer days without the benefit of refrigeration. Maybe, if I were camping, or traveling in the Third World. As a well-fed middle class American it is pretty damn unlikely that I’m going to be suffering from nutritional deficiencies (inability to eat aside) requiring me to make use of preserved meats. I still don’t know why I wanted it other than possibly because salt will often settle my stomach. On a pretzel, or a saltine-not a hunk of greasy, over-spiced beef of questionable origin. Eh, well you know me-I paid for it, so I was determined to eat it. I could have had the undying appreciation of my dog had I chucked the last of it into his bowl, but instead I sat there nibbling away between choruses of  "Davy Crockett." I feel like a real frontierswoman-I ‘d go out and split logs, but it’s getting kind of dark early these days.

Mind you, I didn’t get much sleep last night and that might be impairing my thought process. In the middle of the night-three-ish, I had this dream about Spanish dancing and flamenco dancers and the "click-click-click" of castanets. Then, I sort of woke-up a bit and realised the click-click-click was coming from the closet next to my bed where I’d set a couple of mousetraps. Then I realised it was a not quite dead (not al all really, by the sound of it) slamming itself against the wall trying to get out of the trap. There really isn’t much going back to sleep after that, you know?

It has been thirty years (almost exactly) since I last consumed a preserved beef product of this sort. I remember it as clearly as my mother’s orange kitchen because it was three very day we moved from that orange kitchen to a house with a brand-new brown kitchen. October 1978.

You know how moving can get, particularly when they’d spent over twenty years in that house and had tons of crap to move that would probably never be seen again until the subsequent move. My father wisely went to work that day and was nowhere to be seen until very late that evening when we were all over at the new place. Why we didn’t just order a pizza like normal people, I’ll never know but instead I remember going with my sister to a gas station and buying beef sticks, potato chips and peanut M&M’s. After a day like that, it probably made sense, and there weren’t any 24-hour grocery stores at the time. As it was, we had to find a gas station down on the highway that sold more than fuses and bottles of pop.

We’re friends here, right? So I can share that I spent the first night in our new house puking my guts out all over the green marble tile in the elegant (for the day) bathroom my parents had designed for their two daughters. It was larger than my present day bedroom, and very, very green. We even had two sinks, just in case we both wanted to wash our hands at the same time-which I’m sure came up really often. You know how it is, you have a few bucks in your pocket and you’re building a house and even though it is unlikely, you wouldn’t want your daughters to be forced to share bathroom sinks. Anyway, I found out an important fact about our new house that I’d keep in mind through my later teenaged years when I’d be tempted to overindulge in alcohol- the green and white-stripped inlay tile was really uncomfortable to kneel on for any extended period of time. It was so much easier to throw up in the driveway, or the neighbour’s lawn. Kneeling over the stool puking is also a good time to get acquainted with the plumbing because you may someday need to know whether you have an American Standard or a Bemis. You’ll know after subsequently having a good beef stick barf because the maker’s logo is the only thing at eye level and no matter how hard you may try; it is impossible to not read in the bathroom. Besides, it was a brand new bathroom (the house newly built) it’s not like there was interesting rust stains or anything else to look at in the bowl.

Right, so I think thirty years is a pretty good run for having avoided the lure of greasy, salted somewhat dried beef-don’t you? You’d think with all the other lovely things popping into my head lately that I’d suddenly remember being about as sick to my stomach as I’ve ever been-instead of the silly grey, vinyl-covered dresser we had at the top of the stairs or the bobble-head dolls with magnetic lips (for kissing, of course) that my mother had on the dresser. Or the hanging lamps with velvet shades in navy and brown stripes. Or the pepper grinder (wait, actually, I’m still using that pepper grinder) and so on. All this useless information churning around in my head (I can still remember the covers of hundreds of my comic books for heaven’s sake) but I can’t manage to remember that the after effects of that beef stick in 1978 was worlds worse than the bout of amoebic dysentery I had in 1992.

Have I learned a lesson from all this? Have I learned to stop before making impulse purchases in the grocer because I think, "today’s the day I’m going to eat without getting sick" when I know damn well it isn’t? I don’t know, but there’s a canister of shoestring potato sticks on the kitchen counter waiting to find out. I mean, I haven’t had those since that day we took the fieldtrip to Lincoln Park Zoo in 1974, and I knew it wouldn’t be a good idea given that it was a warm fall day and I was wearing too warm a sweater and my new school shoes and my lunch box had Patty Duke and even though I’d had a bowl of instant grits that morning I still knew that shoestring potato sticks probably wasn’t the best Idea even if they did come in a really neat canister and well, you know how it is when…

My husband accidentally broke our son’s favourite juice glass last week. I was probably more disappointed by the loss than Danny as I’d had the glass since 1971. You see I had to endure grape jelly on my toast (blech) to get that glass, and the eight others in the set.  I’m pretty sure my sister helped, but largely the jelly was purchased at my insistence and promise to actually consume the contents. My sister probably fed hers to the cat-she was older and smarter (though the cat was pretty smart too, and might have rejected the stuff as well. This was a cat after all, which managed to outwit the dog and get the food from his bowl before he knew what happened).

The glasses featured characters from Archie comic books, which back then were about twelve cents. I remember a considerable outrage when the price went to fifteen cents and then utter shock when the price settled in at a steep twenty cents. Recently we were at the grocer’s and saw a small display featuring those same Archie comics for three dollars.

So papa broke Danny’s favourite one of the set-the glass featuring Sabrina cleaning her room. It wasn’t Sabrina that Danny fixated on, but rather her old-fashioned canister vacuum cleaner (working by itself-she was a teenage witch you know). My kid is vacuum cleaner obsessed. I’m not kidding. A great afternoon for this child is going to the Goodwill where he can examine all the ancient and defunct models available for sale. He knows makes and models (though he’s pretty good with cars as well). From the moment he spotted that glass, water never tasted so delicious as it did in the "Old Fashioned Vacuum Cleaner Glass". And then his Papa broke it.

Well, that’s what EBay is for. We realise that buying the glass, paying for shipping, etc. was kind of an extravagance-what with the level of suffering in the world and here we are scouring the auction site for a stupid jelly glass from 1971. It’s not like our lives would come crashing to a halt without it and I don’t especially think replacing everything that gets broken is a good way for Danny to learn how to be responsible for his things-but he didn’t break it, his father did. We bought the glass.

Apparently, there are many, many Archie jelly glasses available for sale on EBay. This is good to know, in the event of any future mishaps. We were puzzled by the popularity of something that was meant to be collected, but not collectible. I mean, in 1971 no one could have anticipated the whole Beanie Baby created-collectivity phenomenon. Sure, people were collecting crazy shit like Hummels (or as my dad used to call them "Hitler’s Youth Figurines" or sometimes more generously, "Little Nazis") but I suspect people kept them for much the same reason I did-the memory of all that sickening grape jelly.

They’re pretty interesting snapshots of an era though. One glass, titled, "Betty and Veronica’s Fashion Show" features the girls in hot pants (that’s very short shorts for you youngsters) and knee-high boots, string bikinis, and other "fashions" emphasizing considerable décolletage. Yes, I do realise we’re discussing drawings, but still; these glasses were designed for, and marketed to children (primarily little girls that read Archies). Can you imagine the reaction if you tried selling those today? They were absolutely tarty looking. Sabrina didn’t fare much better in her hip-hugger shorts and stripped, cropped t-shirt. And what was up with the bouffant hair-do? No one was still wearing a bouffant in 1971, except for some old ladies in Des Moines. Ok, and Pat Nixon, she still had a bouffant in ‘71. But no one else did.

I can’t help but think the glasses reflect a strange conflict of the time. While the girls were tarted-up in revealing clothing, their hair-do’s spoke to middle-class respectability. None of that "hippie" stuff to be found, just what the illustrator’s syndicate figured would sell, both to children and their mothers purchasing the jelly. Safe within the accepted norms that permitted making sex objects of teenaged girls, but in a "respectable" way. Sort of pathetic, like hearing your dad say "mod" or seeing your mother wearing dungarees. I’m almost embarrassed for the characters, trapped in their go-go boots and headbands. So once Sabrina’s room is cleaned, then what? Off to burn her bra? March in the streets? College? Looking at the glass, one gets the impression that long after her room is cleared of dust, she’ll be reclining on the same chaise, drinking the same soda through a straw and watching the same television. Where we were all expected to be.

My most memorable Valentine’s Day isn’t for the reasons one might think. 

I had the unenviable job of working as a supervisor at a telemarketing company that did political fundraising calls. For roughly ten hours a day (though often enough, double shifts) I’d listen to call after call as our employees tried to convince people to cough up just a few more dollars to this or that campaign or PAC. This was right as the Lewinsky story was breaking and sarcastic callers would refer to Clinton’s problems as a "difficult blow" to the Democrats-and then proceeds to ask for more money. I worked for that company through the impeachment, listening to daily frustration and outrage from donors over Clinton’s behaviour. Mind you, they weren’t outraged over Bosnia, or NAFTA, or "Welfare Reform" that drove the poor into all the more desperate situations-oh no, they were upset that Clinton had not been more careful and avoided getting caught. Obstruction of justice in a sexual harassment suit, be damned-he was embarrassing donors.