My Lifelong Childhood

"MARCH, MARCH ON DOWN THE FIELD..." High School Days Mount Vernon, in the 1960's, had two high schools, one "academic", and the other, vocational...A.B. Davis and Edison High Schools respectively.   It was expected that, if you wanted to go on to college, you'd go to Davis.  As such was my lot, I started Davis in September of 1959, a 3-year school encompassing grades 10 to 12. Ol' A.B. Davis  It had a glorious past as I've previously pointed out, producing E.B. White, Art Carney, Dick Clark, Ralph Branca, the hapless Brooklyn Dodger pitcher who, in a 1951 playoff, allowed a walk-off home run to Bobby Thomson in the "Shot Heard Round the World", among many other luminaries.  It was an imposing building sitting atop a hill on Gramatan Avenue spinning off our nick name, the Hilltoppers and our newspaper, the Davis Hi-News.  Sitting in front of the building was a large statue, not of A.B. Davis, a former principal but of someone e...

"LIFE REVIEW" SCHOOL DAYS... The other evening, I attended a lecture by a geriatric psychiatrist who did a wonderful presentation on Bob Dylan.  In mentioning Dylan's autobiography, he talked about aging and doing a "life review".  Dylan, he says, is acknowledging but not denying aging in his memoir.  At the risk of sounding morbid and turning my readers off, if you were to google "life review", you would see it is a concept that occurs in near-death experiences when one's life flashes before them, but, excluding that untoward event, it is also a pathway to successful aging.  It is about "framing one's life in the past, present and future.  It is about expressing what matters to the individual, hopes for the days to come, and personal legacy". (T.M Meuser, University of Missouri, St. Louis).  This will probably be the most serious thing I'll say in my blog...so you can all sit back and relax now. I figure that, since 194...

TREASURED EXPERIENCES I consider myself privileged to have had my childhood in a loving, nurturing environment.  Now in the early part of my eighth decade of life (can it be???), my youthful experiences still resonate in my memory and act as a scaffold for the way I think and act.  They bring me comfort and joy and I am honored to share them with you. THE EARLY DAYS In those pre-internet years of the late 1940's and 1950's, besides going to school, the main childhood activity was PLAY , and play we did...having friends up and down our neighborhood streets with whom I'd play football in the street, putting on plays, making an empty lot into a fortress for our "Rusty Raiders" (yes, that's what we called ourselves!), and playing Ringolevio into the late hours of a summer evening.  The latter was a variant of Tag, originating in the late 19th century on the teeming streets of New York, apparently having been brought over from the British Isles.  It had two ...