This is an easy one for me. I’ve been at the outdoor pool every day that it’s been open since Memorial Day weekend. Starting this week, it’s open every day. The lifeguards are mostly high school students and the seniors are out for summer. Woo hoo!
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For most of my life, I lived in homes with no air conditioning. Growing up, we made it through the muggy New England summers with fans and one window air conditioning unit in my parents’ bedroom. Throughout college and my first few apartments, I had no a/c at all. We purchased a window air conditioning unit for our bedroom in our first house.
It wasn’t until we moved into our second home that I experienced the true luxury of central air conditioning. I was 39 years old. Between menopause, global warming, and the extra layer of fat I now wear, I could never go back to A/C-less living.
That’s my tagline for today. This is the last birthday of my fifties. My sixtieth year—my sixth decade—starts now.
That’s right, GenX is gonna be hitting 60 in 2025. I found a couple of very 80s concert outfit pics from 1982ish. I saw both the Go-Go’s and the B-52’s live in Boston. I can’t remember which outfit was for which.
What are the most important things needed to live a good life?
I think books, music and art make life worth living, once basic needs (food, shelter, safety) are met.
I got to go to an art show by a dear old friend from college last night. It is her first gallery show. In college, she was a double major in art history and religion. For decades, she’s worked as a museum educator and administrator.
She always had an artist’s eye and soul. We studied abroad in Italy at the same time and traveled together on our fall break. A fellow blogger’s post about the city of Bergamo (Italy) reminded me of that trip. We went to Bergamo, Parma, Verona, Venice, and Milan.
Her artwork involves deconstructing everyday packaging and reassembling in very cool ways.
A year ago this week, we were in Grand Canyon National Park.
This trip was motivated by the death of my close friend Carla who loved the Grand Canyon and whose ashes are spread there. (Carla is the person who set me up with my husband more than 33 years ago.) I would consider it my first “bucket list” trip of retirement, even though I didn’t retire until six months later.
I’m lucky to have a kind and hardworking husband who is willing to travel with me (within reason). He doesn’t love it like I do, but he usually ends up liking the trip a lot more than he thought he would.
Thirty-one years of marriage—that’s a whole lot of time together!
The Grand Canyon lives up to the hype. Go, if you can.
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I’ve got a fairly long and hard to pronounce last name, but if my last name were Smith, I’d go with something more exciting than Mary for my first name.
Marina?
Marissa?
Melissa?
Melody?
Melanie?
Melania
If you’re from the East Coast, you probably know about Sky Bars. The genius chocolate bar with four different flavors buried inside—caramel, vanilla, peanut, and fudge. In my memory, the vanilla was more like marshmallow.
Here’s a brief history of the Sky Bar from SkyBarCandy.com:
The Sky Bar was invented in 1938 at the New England Confectionery Company (“NECCO”). The molded chocolate bar revolutionized confectionery technology as the first chocolate bar to have multiple different flavored centers. Chocolate bars of a similar molded form had started popping up around the early 1900s, but none had the same internal complexity of the Sky Bar. Recognizing the innovation they had on their hands, the folks at NECCO chose the name “Sky Bar” because flight was the excitement of the day. They chose to launch this new candy bar with a sky writing marketing campaign and they built up anticipation by advertising the upcoming sky writing events. In the 1950’s and 1960’s, the era of the family road trip and the vending machine, Sky Bars were seemingly everywhere. Thanks to extensive TV advertising, the Sky Bar was the candy bar of choice for many families, primarily up and down the East Coast. As a result, the Sky Bar evokes special childhood memories for many. It was continuously manufactured by NECCO for 80 years, and after a hiatus of only a year and a half, it is back, and looking forward to the next 80 years and a new generation of Sky Bar fans!
I haven’t had one in years, but thanks to this prompt, I will be buying one soon. Since NECCO went out of business in 2018, I have my doubts that the new manufacturer will make then exactly the same way, but we shall see. I’ll try to have an open mind.
Do you remember your favorite book from childhood?
I remember having “Pat the Bunny” as a very young child.
Books by Dr. Seuss and his protégé P.D. Eastman (“Go Dog Go”) were good for both learning to read and being read to. Horton was particularly fascinating, perched on that nest while lazy Mayzie flew off to Palm Beach!
As I got older, nothing beat Judy Blume for real talk about real things that I actually cared about. “Deenie” was a favorite and of course, “Are you there God? It’s me, Margaret?”
Book banners like to target Judy Blume books, which is all the more reason to keep buying them, reading them, and giving them to your kids and grandkids.
Florida resident and bookstore owner Judy Blume tells us how she really feels about her governor.
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck gave me a much better understanding of the Depression and the Dust Bowl and that whole chapter in US history. The take home message that people were poor to the point of starving, with no safety net, is something that stayed with me.
Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi was not an easy read, but I’m glad I made it through. It was one of several books that became bestsellers during the worldwide racial justice reckoning that followed the murder of George Floyd in May 2020. It’s a survey of the history of anti-Black racist ideas throughout American history. It helped lift the veil from my eyes.
The Handmaids Tale by Margaret Atwood came out when I was in college and was a huge bestseller. This dystopian novel describes a Christian fundamentalist theocratic regime in the former United States where some women are forced to conceive and bear children in the most horrific way. It really motivated my involvement with the pro-choice movement of the 1980s. I recently read the sequel: The Testaments, which was published in 2019.
So much of Handmaid’s Tale horror has re-surfaced and resonated loudly since the Dobbs decision by the MAGA Supreme Court. It’s scary—and infuriating.
I had a fear that I was never going to be able to get past knowing that certain people in my family had supported Trump for President in 2016 and 2020. When Trump finally lost in 2020 (after multiple days of waffling by the networks), I thought I’d be able to put that knowledge behind me, but then the insurrection happened and they did not condemn it.
When Biden was finally sworn in, I tried to “get over it.” For a while, I did. I never dreamed the GOP would nominate Trump again in 2024, but apparently that’s exactly what’s going to happen next month (despite the fact that Trump is now a convicted felon).
My feelings of anger towards these family members is back and now I feel they are truly permanent. I don’t think I will overcome them.
It’s sad that a once-in-a-lifetime con man and demagogue has torn apart so many perfectly good relationships. To me, supporting the new MAGA GOP is not a matter of right vs left, but right vs wrong.
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