I haven’t posted for over a year. Stuff happens.
One more bit of stuff that’s going to happen in the next few weeks is that I’ll be posting again, but on a new platform at a new address. I’m not sure if I’ll be changing the blog’s title. “The Geriatric Review” has been suggested. Either way, I hope and think it will look nicer and be more stable and easy to use. I honestly don’t know what direction the whole enterprise will take, but both of you can expect the standard jibbering cogitation. I’ll post appropriate info when I have it.
Anyway, I’m still here, and I’m still working on my office. Most of the books (160 baseball titles alone to the Wesleyan University Library book sale), and lots of the files and papers are gone, along with most of the random detritus. But here’s a partial list of items I just pulled out of corners and drawers, or off the back of bookcases.
- Five baseballs, all decades old. Two used, two autographed, one pristine.
- A rubber gizmo used to keep cross-country skis together. (You need two for the system to work.)
- A yarmulke. I used to carry one in a pocket of each of my sport and suit jackets. You never know….
- A tiny fielder’s mitt my grandfather tossed into my crib in 1948.
- A single bronzed bookend from the late 1920s, made from one of my mother’s baby shoes. The other one’s around here somewhere….
- My dad’s Wilson 1940-vintage Ellsworth Vines tennis racket, in its press. Your ad!
- A Speedy Stitcher sewing awl, “… a handy tool to have around the house, farm or any place where heavy material has to be sewn.” I think I may actually have used it. Once.
- A 1928 YMCA Checker Championship trophy won by my mother’s father.
- A small wooden music box that plays “Stardust,” a wedding gift to my parents in 1945.
- Three inflating needles, used in decades past mostly for basketballs, but occasionally for the random soccer ball or baby gizmo.
- An Ace bandage wrapped in a length of well-greyed adhesive tape. I’m pretty sure this came home from college with me in the summer of 1966.
- And, best of all in a way, a small, tattered, fake stuffed bird that was given to me, for reasons I no longer remember, by friends on my 21st birthday, and has been hanging off of a series of study and office lamps ever since.
What do I do with all this? You can have the needles, the ski thingy, the yarmulke, the Ace, and maybe the awl, but what can I do with the rest? It’s family history. Maybe I’ll start a museum.
