Once Upon a Time in the East...

...it was great to be alive.

Home For The Holidays

From All of Us To All of You

My Favorite Scrooge

One Of My Favorite Popeye Cartoons

The first time I saw this cartoon was on a cathode-ray-tube, black-and-white TV set when I was only four or five years old. It was probably a Sylvania or a Zenith or maybe a Philco. Come to think of it, the TV was probably an Admiral floor model. That would have been somewhere around 1955 or 1956. Back then, I thought this cartoon was really funny but also a little bit scary. One of my favorite things about Popeye cartoons was the way he muttered to himself all the time and his funny, flip remarks to others in the cartoons. Thanks to YouTube and YouTube users, Popeye can be more than just a pleasant memory for all of us.

A Knife In The Heart

I heard the chain saw this morning, cutting and cutting, sawing and sawing. I thought it was one of the neighbors cutting firewood. I was wrong. Then I heard the loud snap and the horrendous, terrible crash.

Downstairs, I could tell that my mother had something important to tell me. Something awful. Then I heard the words.

At the house where I did my growing up between age 7 and 20 — a house we can still see from our kitchen and living room windows — they cut down the tall tree that my father had planted 50 years ago. It was a magnificent, towering hybrid of an ash and some other kind of tree that I can no longer remember.

That's right. It's their property, not ours anymore. It was their tree and they had a right to cut it down. Still, that was the last living memory my mother had of my father, except for our 17-year-old cat that Dad found in an abandoned cardboard box back in 1994. I hope that cat lives forever.

And the tree is gone now. And, yes, it was the tallest tree in town and the tallest and the most magnificent tree this town has ever seen or is likely to ever see again.

This is what it's like to be doomed to living out the rest of your life in a town that should have been in your rear-view mirror a long time ago. What we have instead is a living nightmare that should have been a pleasant dream, departing from us on good terms ages ago, instead of reminding us that we somehow failed to evolve and that stealing what's left of our hearts and trampling that to death is the penance we somehow deserve for trying to come back "home" a dozen years ago.