Every summer, Vigi and I make at least one excursion to the seashore to take in the frothy surf, the screeching gulls and the screaming kids. Neither of us is particularly fond of sticky salt water or, for that matter, simmering like slabs of bacon on the broiling sand … but we go anyway because, as the mountain climbers say, “It’s there.” So last Monday, we put the top down and followed the traffic toward the ocean.

Veege broiled in the sun while I took pictures of anything that moved, until we both became hot and hungry enough to head for the boardwalk in search of food. The destination for our sand-filled shoes became the first teeny-bopper open-storefront that demanded patrons wear shoes and the help wash their hands. We built a couple of sub-sandwiches, balanced our drinks on a tray and elbowed our way to a table.  It’s nice the way they bolt the benches down so old folks won’t tip over or anything.

Suddenly, as I looked up to take my first bite there it was, hanging on the wall next to the fake vomit, chattering teeth, disappearing ink and whoopee cushions … a genuine Guillow’s Jetfire Glider! As Veege and I talked, spilling lettuce, onion and black olive slices onto the sandwich paper, she must have noticed I was looking past her, not at her. “You have hats older than some of those kids.” she observed. She probably thought I was staring at the constant parade of marginally clad beach bunnies passing behind her.

Any other time, she might have been right but this was something special! I hadn’t seen one of those gliders since long before any of those jiggly little maids were even an urge in daddy’s libido. “I’ve got to have one of those!” I exclaimed. Fortunately the love of my life looked around, instead of slugging me, just as I got up and reached for one of those balsa wood beauties. In fact, I retrieved two and headed for a pair of uniformed girls behind the counter [their matching red t-shirts said "Eats!"].

“That’ll be $5.32.” said the one with the earring in her nose. “Gee!” I exclaimed, stroking the silvery hairs on my chin. “Ya’ know, when I was a kid we used to call these 10¢ gliders?” “Really?” she replied trying to seem interested but, most likely wondering why the old coot didn’t just pay his money and go. “Really!” I pressed. “Ya know why we called them 10¢ gliders?” This one nearly stumped them both. Now their complacency became curiosity, until the other one, with the pierced tongue said, “Um-m-m … becauth they cotht 10¢?” “Right!” I affirmed, like a teacher passing out gold stars. From the smiles on their faces you’d think they just answered the $64,000 question. Their apparent joy nearly matched my own. I had just purchased my first 10¢ gliders [for five bucks] since I was old enough to take my dimes down to Hotkin’s Drug Store … one to fly and one for backup, just in case!

We returned home late that night, so test flights were definitely out of the question. The next morning I awoke in a time warp … a reconstituted kid, everywhere but in the mirror. Vigi left for work and the runway was clear! I opened the cellophane and slipped the contents out of the package. The first thing that changed was you had to punch out the tail and stabilizer … and everything was only printed on one side. Balsa can be brittle but I was careful not to split the wood; soon my glider was assembled and ready for flight. In case you hadn’t guessed, this was one of my favorite things to do in my early kidhood … even better than having rock fights with Norry Ricky [ I still have a dent in my head]!

My leather flying cap, goggles and silk scarf were mentally in place as I headed for the yard. I wet one finger, sensed the wind and adjusted the front wing … forward for loops, back for straight flight. I chose forward. Grasping the tail between thumb and middle finger, with index finger on the rear of the fuselage [my special looping grip that predated even my first baseball mitt], with a slight snapping motion I let fly! My Guillow’s Jetfire did a lazy half-circle to the right and dropped to the ground about ten feet away.

“Guess I’ve lost my touch.” I thought. So it was back to basics, with the wing to the rear and a more conventional grip. I gently released the glider, for level flight, and watched as my Jetfire did a lazy half-circle to the right and dropped to the ground about ten feet away. Forty-five minutes, several wing adjustments and an equal number of lazy half-circles later, I decided I simply wasn’t putting enough “English” on it. By now my mental flying cap, goggles and scarf were in tatters on the ground and I had regressed several decades into a nine year old with a mission.

Forgetting that even someone of advancing years possesses greater arm strength than that younger pilot, I set the wing forward, reared back and using my special looping grip, fired my prized aircraft into the wind, like a pitcher releasing a fastball with two out in the ninth inning of a perfect game! There was no lazy half-circle to the right. There was no ten foot flight. There was no loop. There was only the sickening sound that crackling balsa wood makes … as the wings folded upward and the remains fluttered slowly to the ground like a wounded, featherless bird.

“Good thing I bought a backup.” I mumbled to myself as I slipped the parts to my second glider from their package and carefully assembled them. This time, no attempts at flight were made. The Guillow’s Jetfire is permanently grounded in my memorabilia museum, printed side out, next to the fortune telling 8-ball, Magnus Harmonica, Duncan Yo-yo and my somewhat worn but still serviceable whoopee cushion!

Listen to Bananas Crackers and Nuts Podcast. Find Links under “Recent Podcasts”… and more shows on my Podcast Page.

A few mornings ago, as I poured my bran-laced wheat cereal into my personal, oversized bowl, my mind flashed back to a simpler time when we didn’t have the dozens of exotic, sugar-coated morsels today’s kids choose from for breakfast. All we had were a few humdrum variations of corn, rice, wheat and oats. When doused with milk, the stuff either floated or sank and if you wanted sugar, you spooned it on. That was pretty much it.

When Tony The Tiger came along with the Grrr-e-a-t! taste of Sugar Frosted Flakes, he ushered in a whole new era of morning crunchdom for kids of all ages. They even came out with a cereal that was supposed to have been shot from guns! It sounded a little dangerous to me but I tried some anyway. Somehow, I still preferred the sound of Rice Krispies in my bowl … they spoke to me. I even had three hand puppets of Snap, Crackle and Pop. Geez, how prophetic. I never dreamed that, someday, I’d have a whole other association with those sounds.

But back then, there were compensations for the lack of contemporary colors, shapes and sugar-coating … there were premiums. There were adjustable rings with secret compartments, toy cars, motor boats, submarines that rose and sank in the bathtub [if you packed enough of mom's baking powder into them], decals, badges, puzzles, games, even scuba divers … usually right inside the box. Bigger or more valuable treasure, like pocket decoders and baseball caps, you had to send away for. It seemed like a box top and a quarter could get a kid just about anything from Battle Creek Michigan.

Oh ya’ … there was cereal in there, too, and you had to eat all of it to get the toy at the bottom of the box. Unless!! If you could get to the box before your mom and open it from the bottom, you could get the prize first! Then the FDA stepped in and took all the sport out of it. Somebody in the government decided it wasn’t healthy to put premiums directly into the cereal, so they began putting them between the box and the waxed paper liner where you could easily reach them from either end.

My defining memory of modern packaging occurred while staying with some friends for a few days. One morning I watched in amazement as their nine-year-old spent fully fifteen minutes draped dreamily across the kitchen table, contemplating no fewer than six different cereals from Fruit Loops to Cap’n Crunch … and finally moaned, “Isn’t there anything else?” There were no premiums inside.

The circular nature of life will never cease to amaze me. I started out with plain cereal, cycled through the designer species and have now come back to the beginning … plain cereal. I need bran now, so the Rice Krispies are talking to someone else these days; they always left me hungry, anyway. However, there is one sneaky carryover … the snap, crackle and pop.

As I travel the journey from agile youth with cat-like movements into a sonic re-creation of my old breakfast companions in a bowl of warm milk, I realize my best chance of finding those vaunted “Golden Years” is with a bucket of paint and a very large paintbrush.

More and more I realize that when I shave, it’s not my own face I’m shaving so much as my Father’s … but I think it’s the sounds I resent most of all, especially the dry kindling effect that sometimes spoils even my best attempts at a swagger. Just the other night, I was gliding across the living room floor when, suddenly, a toe went off for no apparent reason and continued to resonate with every step. Vigi thought it was one of the logs in the house developing a new crack!

For better or worse I guess my old friends from the breakfast table will always be with me, but I still find a premium every morning. I said it seemed like a kid could get just about anything from Battle Creek Michigan. Well, as an adult I discovered Vigi in Kalamazoo, the next town over … and I didn’t even have to send in a box top!

Listen to Bananas Crackers and Nuts Podcast. Find Links under “Recent Podcasts”… and more shows on my Podcast Page.

In my lifetime, I’ve learned to believe nothing I hear and only about half of what I see. So when the T.V. ad for “Your Baby Can Read” came on, I figured it was a comedy spoof or maybe the announcer had been playing with one of those do-it-yourself lobotomy kits … but these psychos were serious. They were actually selling a course for teaching a toddler to read!

My amazement pegged to better than 7.5 on the Richter scale when I learned my grandchildren were being taught Spanish lingo and computer skills as early as the first grade, but it turns out that was mere child’s play. Only this morning I heard about some ‘enlightened’ school system in Montana that wants to provide sex education to students, beginning as early as kindergarten! Hey, when do kids get to be kids anymore? Kidhood is an important part of becoming a well-rounded adult!

I suppose all this is aimed at helping our younger generations compete in a rough and tumble world but, it seems to me, they’re not being equipped with many of the most important survival skills … things like how to win gracefully or how to get back up when they lose. Talk about competing, some schools don’t even keep score in sports or give out report cards anymore for fear of hurting somebody’s self-esteem. Believe me, in the real world they keep score in everything and nobody is worried about hurting anyone’s feelings!

The crowd that wants to impose their values upon our kids seems to put a lot of stock in a bunch of standardized test scores. Apparently, students in the U.S. are supposed to rank around 18th in the world when it comes to smarts. But if we’re raising so many dunces, how is it that nearly all the great discoveries, inventions and achievements in the past couple of hundred years have come from America?

One of my sons consistently scored so poorly on tests that his mother remarked, “How come my kid has to be so stupid?” On the other hand, teach this kid a concept and he would use it to death and even find a few new ways to apply it! One of my daughters was just the opposite … she could memorize lists of facts and ace exams to the delight of everyone giving out gold stars for the top of the test, but before very long she remembered little of what she supposedly ‘learned.’

I have a feeling that most of the lemmings being churned out by the ‘progressive’ educational programs of many high-scoring countries hear mostly echoes, where information once resided, only a few days after cramming for an exam. Give me a kid with imagination … the creativity to build a scooter from a pair of skates, a rifle from a broomstick or a space ship from a refrigerator carton any day, over the little crumb-cruncher who listens to pre-natal Mozart and learns more about political correctness than readin’, writin’, and ‘rithmetic by the third grade.

Another reality that probably tends to flatten out the ol’ bell curve is that America is one of the few countries that educates everybody, not just the privileged! It’s interesting to watch the U.S. try to be more like other countries, while the rest of the world is scrambling to emulate us. Sometimes I think we forget that our unique ability to color outside the lines is what got us here in the first place.

It just seems like old fashioned, character building kidhood has been replaced by some misguided sense of higher purpose. Maybe the secret of future success lies in simply getting back to a place where we were actually raising children instead of merely force-feeding small adults.  What good is getting a kid to finish all his peas if he doesn’t know how to keep them from rolling off the knife?

Listen to Bananas Crackers and Nuts Podcast. Find Links under “Recent Podcasts”… and more shows on my Podcast Page.

Hundreds of American flags surrounded the old brick town hall … to the right, to the left and all the way up the block as far as the eye could see. As I turned to lock my car, I realized the park across the street was filled with fluttering flags, too. Affixed to each flag’s standard was the name and picture of an American military hero from Monroe County who was either currently serving our country, or had made the supreme sacrifice in defense of freedom.

As I mounted the first step to the hall where the reception was being held, I was drawn to look one more time at the sea of red, white and blue behind me. Two thoughts elbowed their way past the vision of my friend and his new bride greeting me with broad smiles at the top of the stairs.

To begin with, a patriotic display like this wouldn’t be possible back home. Some malcontent who finds the symbol of our great nation offensive would show up with his fat wallet and fancy lawyer to rip it down, instead of simply averting his allegedly offended eyes. And speaking of things that offend, I couldn’t help but think how it sandpapers my skin to see occasions like the Fourth of July so heavily commercialized for profit or, even worse, re-defined to fit some political agenda … as are so many celebrations of American exceptionalism. The people in this area actually get it! No wonder the last time I returned from Tennessee I told my friends, “I just spent a week in America.”

Only a few days ago, a national figure seized upon the occasion of our nation’s birth to misrepresent The Statue of Liberty, herself, as a statue of immigration! Perhaps he was confused by Emma Lazarus’ poem which was added to the pedestal many years after Miss Liberty was erected.

In fact, The Statue stands for the freedom and democracy won during our revolutionary war … so much admired by the French that they gifted us with the great lady of the harbor as a sign of friendship in 1886. Like our flag, which has carried freedom forward to so many darkened corners of the world, her torch illuminates those corners and brings the light of hope to the oppressed. While she may often have been the first glorious sight for those seeking America’s opportunity, it is Ellis Island that was immigration’s front door until 1954.

As my long sleeved jacket and tight white collar generated more than a bead of perspiration in the summer sun, I imagined how stifling the room must have been in Philadelphia as John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Robert R. Livingston and Roger Sherman hammered out the details of The Declaration of Independence in 1776. Parades, speeches, bedding sales and barbecues notwithstanding, think of the verbal fireworks at the Continental Congress, as our founding fathers lit the fuse for that first Fourth of July!

As I watched the field of flags waving in the summer sun, I reflected upon the sacrifices by all those who made it possible for me to be there that afternoon, without fear of reprisal for what I might say or do … made it possible to pass safely and unimpeded from state to state and shake the hand of a good friend beginning a new life.

We ate, drank and danced as a caring couple swore their devotion to each other before God, no matter what the future might bring. It reminded me of a group of caring patriots who pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honor to a new nation a few hundred years ago. As I thought about the optimism of that couple and the dedication of those founders, I prayed that we would always have this great freedom to celebrate and a field of flags to tell the story of our resolve, no matter what the future might bring.

Listen to Bananas Crackers and Nuts Podcast. Find Links under “Recent Podcasts”… and more shows on my Podcast Page.