Tag Archives: nostalgia

Nostalgia Ain’t What It Used to Be

Prolific congratulatory offerings are in order for the conTIMplating household!  My extraordinarily talented and formerly red-headed daughter, Thing 2, graduated from high school last week!  Thank you. Thank you very much.  That’s one reason I haven’t posted in a while.  I’ve been busier than Josh Earnest after Obama goes off teleprompter.  This is because as the end of the senior year approaches, everything leading up to graduation is The Last One:  The Last choir concert; The Last theater performance; The Last prom; The Last suspension; etc.  And being the good parent I am I felt I should be there for The Last One.  I can’t just sit around and blog or go out and play golf and miss The Last One like it was The Second-to-Last One.  Well, maybe a quick nine.  I can be a little late.

Unlike Thing 1’s graduation, which was highly celebratory in nature, going through the process of graduating my concluding offspring made me a bit nostalgic for the tight-rolled pants and leather ties of my own commencement.  I suppose it was due to the compatible similarities of the two events, detached only by the passage of 30 years:  both were in early June in un-air-conditioned arenas where friends and family sweat it out on bleacher seating; both of us were the youngest in our family to graduate leaving the distinct probability of parental empty nesting; and both were as a member of a quartet of inseparable friends taking part in one last official and emotional milestone together.  (If I knew what an emoji was, I would insert it here.) Continue reading →

The Year of Blogging Dangerously

Well, here we are: conTIMplating one year later.  Has it been a year already?  It has.  It seems just like yesterday that I was debating which pair of boxers to wear for my big background photo shoot.  If I were Bob Hope I’d start singing “Thanks for the Memories” but luckily for Mrs. Hope, I am not Bob Hope.

I suppose to accompany the congratulatory fanfare and wellwishiness you are feeling right now an appropriate post would be a clever recap of the past twelve months that revisited the high and low points of a year-old page of spectacular electronic webness such as this, but it doesn’t make any sense to recap because unfortunately, it was never capped in the first place.  Besides, like the old saying goes, nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.

So if you’ll permit, I will simply wax illogic Continue reading →

My Shopping’s Done. You?

Pardon me while I wax nostalgic such that it’s all shiny and the water on it bubbles up to where you could use it to wrap fragile mailings, but Christmas just isn’t what it used to be.  It probably has something to do with my considerable and snowballing oldness and its accompanying cantankerous irritability.  Get off my lawn, by the way.

When you’re a kid every Christmas is like, well…Christmas.  It was an enchanted time of sugarplums and fairies and sugarplum fairies and more sugar but not quite so many fairies.  They were days of innocence in which an infant could travel to grandma’s in the back window of an LTD and if you sat too close to the fire in your PJ’s they would melt right onto your skin.  It was back when it was perfectly safe to drape a month-old, dried-out evergreen tree in the same red-hot incandescent light bulbs we used in toy ovens to bake tasty treats. Continue reading →

Pompous Circumstances

There is a problem within our communities that is growing like a pimple on the derriere of society. It seems there are youths living among us who infiltrate our school systems and, after several years of intense study, come to be known as…Valedictorians.

Your mind is no doubt reeling at this scandalous revelation. Some of you are in denial: “Surely not our schools.” Some are angry: “How could we have let this happen?” And some of you simply choose to ignore it: “How about that Downton Abbey?” Do what you will but this is a problem that, like Madonna, refuses to go away. Continue reading →