Lift Up Your Hearts!

Having lived through more than seven decades of holidays, I decided it would be of interest (to me, if no one else) to consider how the various annual celebrations have changed, or not changed, as I've lived my life.

As a child, I knew that holidays were about three things: family, presents, and days off from school. Not necessarily in that order—since family was the ocean in which I swam, I didn't necessarily recognize how central it was to our observances. The only celebration from which we children were excluded was my parents' anniversary. I remember being sad about that as a child, and I admire those who celebrate anniversaries as the "family birthday." What a great idea! But "date night" was unheard of in that era, and their anniversary was one of the rare times my parents would splurge on dinner in a restaurant.

Yes, folks, basically the only time we ate out was on vacations, where Howard Johnson's—with its peppermint stick ice cream—was the highlight. Solidly middle class as we were, with an engineer's salary to support us, restaurant meals simply did not fit into our regular budget. "Not even McDonalds?" you ask. Brace yourself: I was born before the first McDonalds franchise. But even when our town did get a McDonald's, the idea of paying someone to fix a meal my mother could make better at home seemed crazy.

But back to the holidays. I'll go chronologically, which means beginning with New Year's Day, which could just as well go last, as New Year's Eve. Other people may have celebrated with big bashes and lots of champagne, but we almost always spent New Year's Eve with family friends, either at their home or ours. My parents and the Dietzes had been friends since before any children were born, and by the time each family had four we made quite a merry party all by ourselves. I think the adults usually played cards, and we kids had the basement to ourselves. Of course there was that other important feature at a party: food. Lots of good food, homemade of course.

Those who didn't fall asleep beforehand counted down to the new year, and toasted with a beverage of some sort. The adults may have had a glass of champagne. One year Mr. Dietze set off a cherry bomb in the snow, which was amazing (and illegal) in the days before spectacular fireworks became ubiquitous. I miss the awe and wonder that rarity engendered. After a little more eating and talking, we gathered up sleeping children and went home. As it was the only time of the year we were allowed to stay up to such an hour, that too was a treat. Once a year past midnight is still about right for me, though sadly it didn't stay that rare.

Valentine's Day was next. This was not the major holiday it is today, and it was mostly child-centered. In elementary school we created paper "mailboxes" for delivery of small paper Valentines to our classmates; Here's an example of what they looked like. (Click to enlarge.) Some of them may have sounded romantic, but nothing could have been further from our minds. It was just a friend thing, and we enjoyed trying to match the sentiments with the personalities of our friends. Back home, if there was anything romantic about it for my parents, I missed it, being far too concerned with chocolate, and small candy hearts with words on them. Sometimes I'd make a heart cake, formed using a square cake and a round cake cut in half, and decorated with pink frosting and cinnamon candy hearts.

There were two more February holidays that no one celebrates anymore: Abraham Lincoln's birthday on the 12th, and George Washington's on the 22nd. We would get one day or the other off from school, but not both. Nowadays they've morphed into President's Day, which is in February but I never remember when because it keeps changing.

March brought St. Patrick's Day, which was bigger in school than anywhere else, chiefly through room decorations with green shamrocks, leprechauns, and rainbows with pots of gold. In elementary school, some of our neighborhood kids had formed a small singing group—we mostly sang on the bus, but one year our teacher heard about it and persuaded us to go from classroom to classroom singing what Irish songs we knew. Back then, my family didn't know we had some Irish ancestors, so as far as I can remember, the holiday never went beyond the school door.

Easter, of variable date, was of course a big deal. Unlike Christmas, it had mostly lost its Christian significance in favor of bunnies and chicks, eggs and candy. Except for when we were with our grandparents and had to dress in our Easter finery and go to church. The going to church part was okay; the finery not so much.

We kids would put out our Easter baskets the night before, and awaken to find them filled with candy; often toys appeared also. Our baskets were sometimes bought at a store, but often homemade—I remember using a paper cutter to make strips from construction paper, and weaving them into baskets.

For me, the best part was our Easter egg hunt. None of this plastic egg business! We had dyed and decorated real hard-boiled eggs beforehand, and our parents hid them around the house, supplemented by foil-wrapped chocolate eggs, before going to bed on Easter Eve. What a blessing it was to live where it was cool enough at Easter time that eggs could safely be left overnight without fear of spoilage or melting.

Easter dinner was almost always a ham, beautiful and delicious, studded with cloves, crowned with pineapple rings, and covered with a glaze for which I wish I had the recipe. I know we did not always have a "canned ham"—for one thing, I remember the ham bone—but the experience of a canned ham was memorable, since they had to be opened with a "key" at risk of life and limb—or at least of mildly damaged fingers.

May brought Memorial Day, which was always May 30, not this Monday-holiday business. When it fell on a school day, it was a day off, which we always appreciated. There was usually a Memorial Day parade, in which we sometimes participated, with band, scout, or fire department groups. There was always something related to the real meaning of the holiday, but we kids never paid attention to the speeches. Our family was well-represented in wartime contributions, but rarely talked about them, and no one had died, so the holiday has no sad associations in my memory.

Mother's Day was in May, also; what I remember most was fixing breakfast in bed for our mother. For some reason, in those days, eating breakfast in bed was regarded as something special. I have no idea why. For me, the practice is associated with being sick, as back then children were expected to recuperate in bed for a ridiculously long time. We even had a special tray, with games imprinted on it, for sick-in-bed meals. Why a healthy adult would voluntarily eat a meal in bed is still beyond my comprehension.

We sometimes had outings on Mother's Day, and otherwise just did our best to make sure that at the end of the day Mom was in no doubt that she was a mother many times over.

Father's Day, in June, was also low-key, although it was a bit more exciting in the years when it coincided with my brother's birthday.

Independence Day was, like Memorial Day, an occasion for parades and speeches. Our neighborhood usually had its own parade, with decorated bicycles and scooters. Occasionally we would go somewhere to see a public fireworks display, which wasn't anything like the spectacular events seen these days; nor did ordinary people generally have fireworks. Sometimes we had sparklers, and the little black dots that burned into "snakes" when you lit them. One time our neighbors had imported some mild fireworks from a state where they were legal, and we enjoyed them—all but my mother, who protested by staying inside and playing the 1812 Overture loudly on our record player (which, by the way, was monophonic).

August was entirely bereft of holidays, though we kids were busy squeezing the last drops out of our summer vacation from school. Since Labor Day was always on a Monday even before the Monday holiday bill came into being, and school always started right after that, the week or two beforehand was a favorite time for family vacations. This holiday was completely divorced from what it was intended to honor; I think I was in college, or even later, before I made the connection with the labor movement and unions.

October 12 was Columbus Day, as it will always be for me. Its chief value was in being a day of vacation. I could tell you that "In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue," and that his boats were the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria, but that's about it.

Now Hallowe'en, that was a children's holiday! We didn't have it off from school, unless it fell on a weekend—and if it did, our schools were certain to celebrate it anyway. Costumes—usually homemade, often very clever—a parade around the school, and no doubt some special treats were the order of the day. Parents were invited to watch the parade, which was almost always held outdoors. Most of the kids walked to school, and most had parents at home who could come. Some costumes obviously had more parental help than others, but none that I recall were store-bought, nor were there any of the outlandish, sexualized, and violent costumes I've seen today—or even 35 years ago when I watched Hallowe'en parades at our own children's elementary school. Today's society would no doubt be horrified, however, at our Indians with war paint and bows and arrows, our cowboys and soldiers with toy guns, and our knights with swords.

At night, trick-or-treating was nothing like it is today. For one thing, there wasn't nearly as much loot, since we were restricted to our own neighborhoods, and most households gave our much smaller quantities of treats than is common today. None of this business of parents driving their kids all over to increase their hauls, no trunk-or-treat, no candy distributed at businesses and malls; there was little commercial about it. But we sure had fun, and much more freedom, being turned loose to roam freely within the set bounds of our neighborhood, without regard for darkness or danger or costumes that were difficult to see out of and were not festooned with reflective tape. Younger children went trick-or-treating with their parents—who had the grace to stay in the street while the children rang the doorbells on their own—or more likely, older siblings, who tended to stick a little closer in hopes some kind neighbor would offer the chaperones some candy, too. Back home, we'd gleefully sort through our haul, occasionally trading with siblings, without any concerned parents checking it out first. And of course we ate far too much candy. Only the oldest of my brothers had the strength of will to ration his; the rest of us finished ours up within a week, but he usually had some left in the freezer until the following Hallowe'en.

Most of the time, the creation of my costume was a father- and/or mother-daughter collaboration that I looked forward to all year. Offhand, I remember being a clown, a cuckoo clock, a salt shaker (to go along with my best friend, the pepper shaker), a parking meter, and a medieval knight, among others that will not immediately come to mind. After elementary school, my Hallowe'en costume days petered out, except for one year after we moved to the Philadelphia area and a group of my friends persuaded me to make the rounds with them. That's when I discovered why they were still clinging to childish pursuits: we were in a wealthier neighborhood, where rich people gave out full-sized candy bars!

Another treasured family project was carving pumpkins into jack-o-lanterns. We used real knives to cut as soon as we were responsible enough to handle them, and always illuminated our creations with candles, even though a finger or hand was bound to be mildly burned in the lighting process. Often we kept the seeds when we hollowed out the pumpkins, salting and roasting them. It was so much fun!

But there was a worm in the apple: One year, when I was at a very tender age, our jack-o-lanterns were set outside on our porch, as usual. A gang of teenage boys came rampaging through the neighborhood and viscously smashed our creations. It was heartbreaking. I still remember the sound of their stomping feet on the porch, and their gleeful yells.

On the brighter side, with some help from my mother, I once created a Hallowe'en party for my friends, with a "haunted house" in the basement, games, a craft, food, and watching Outer Limits on our little, black and white television set. (I've set the video to show just the opening theme. If you happen to watch the whole thing, and get hooked, Part 2 is here.)

As with the best holidays, there was good food, not just candy. Apple cider—real apple cider straight from the farm, unfiltered and unpasteurized, a delight that few know today. Sometimes cold, sometimes hot and mulled, depending on the weather, which at Hallowe'en in Upstate New York could be just about anything. Apples themselves, tart and delicious, of varieties difficult to impossible to find today. My mother's homemade pumpkin cookies! And pumpkin bread! A plate of cinnamon-sugar donuts, sometimes homemade but often store-bought and nonetheless delicious. Sometimes popcorn, too.

Thanksgiving. We frequently had guests for Thanksgiving dinner. My father's parents lived 200 miles away, and while it wasn't the three-hour trip it is today, it was short enough for us to get together for Thanksgiving. If it wasn't my grandparents sharing our Thanksgiving dinner, it was friends, and sometimes both. The meal was pretty standard: typically turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, stuffing, sweet potatoes, peas, creamed onions, Waldorf salad, cranberry sauce, and rolls, with pumpkin and mincemeat pies. Once we acquired a television set (which happened when I was seven years old), there were parades on TV in the morning for the kids, and football games in the afternoon for the men. The women, no doubt, were cooking!  Much later, when we lived in Pennsylvania and had grown up a bit more, the annual "Turkey Bowl" in our own backyard attracted enough friends to make an exciting touch/tag football game in the crisp November afternoon.

And finally, the best for last: Christmas.

These days, there is a Great Divide in the way Christmas is celebrated: Christian and Secular. In my youth it was not so. Christian or not, we all knew the origins and history of the occasion, and everywhere—in stores, in schools, in the public square—Santa, reindeer, snowmen, Christmas trees, presents, Mary, Joseph, Jesus, animals around the manger, shepherds, and angels mingled happily together. Even the Star and the Three Wise Men worked their way out of their proper setting of Epiphany to join the joyous throng.

I loved choosing and decorating our Christmas tree, especially the many years when we cut our own. Christmas tree farms back then were not what they are now, with their carefully-shaped trees in neatly-planted rows. Each tree had its own personality, and we often had a choice among several varieties. Finding our special tree was an adventure I looked forward to every year. The freedom of choice, and cutting the tree ourselves, were important to me. But somehow I never minded when we ended up adopting orphan trees: those chosen and cut down by other customers, then abandoned after some flaw was discovered. Our hearts went out to the poor things, often beautiful in our eyes. And our decorations easily accommodated any flaws.

Tree decorating in our household followed a standard pattern. After trimming the branches to his satisfaction, my father would set the tree in a large can (#10 comes to mind, but I can't be sure) that he filled with sand and mounted in a wooden frame that he had made. It was placed on a sheet and dressed in a homemade Christmas tree skirt. At that point, he put the light strings on. The lights were multi-colored, and much larger than the tiny lights that later became popular. Unlike the practice that continues in Switzerland today, our lights were not real, lighted candles. But burns were still possible: those incandescent bulbs could get quite hot, and Dad had to be careful with their placement.

As soon as that was done, the whole family went to town on the tree! Decorating was a joyous family affair. Each year we created anew popcorn strings, using red string and large-eyed needles. These went on first, after the lights. (Birds enjoyed the popcorn after the tree was taken down.) We had plastic ornaments that were put on the lower levels, where toddlers could reach. We had lovely glass ornaments for higher places. We had an ornament handmade by my grandmother, and several made by young children. Atop the tree was either a star with a light in it, or a glass spire, depending on our mood. The pièce de la résistance? Draping the branches with "icicles." These are hard to explain if you haven't seen them, but they were an essential part of our beautiful trees. Here's a description I found on Reddit that explains them well.

Growing up in the 50s and 60s, there were two types of "tinsel" (we called them "icicles"), the crinkly kind that was metallic, and the plastic kind that was coated with shiny silver. The crinkly kind, which I assume was the lead type, were a tad heavier so they hung straight, while the wispy plastic type was shinier and might fly around a bit. I remember once the static electricity caused them to sway when I walked right near the tree. You had to put these on one strand at a time, which was tedious. Taking them off was also an issue, you could never get all of them off. Both types seemed to fade in popularity and garland tinsel became more common by the 80s. As artificial trees became more common, "icicles" became less practical, and even garland seemed to fall out of favor. "Icicles" looked best on an open-style Balsam Fir type of tree, and not so good on fuller trees like a Scotch Pine and Douglas Fir.

Even our family became less enthusiastic about icicles when the lead kind was replaced by the plastic, which we considered a very inferior substitute. Not the same thing at all! We did (usually) wash our hands after handling the lead....

I haven't mentioned music, which was always an important part of the season. Everyone knew the standard Christmas carols back then, and just as with the displays, Silent Night, O Little Town of Bethlehem, and O Come, All Ye Faithful mingled happily with Jingle Bells and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. We sang at home, we sang in school, we sang at community events. Instead of a solitary volunteer manning a red kettle and ringing an annoying bell, the Salvation Army band treated passersby to carols in excellent brass arrangements. And of course we played our favorite Christmas records while decorating our tree. One of my favorites was Sing We Now of Christmas, with the Harry Simeone Chorale. Although the album cover featured on this YouTube playlist is different, it has the exact songs from our record, and I was thrilled to discover it.

During my young childhood, my family went reasonably regularly to church—a small Dutch Reformed church in tiny Scotia, New York. We did not, however, go to church on Christmas. Christmas Eve and Christmas morning were strictly family time.

Christmas Eve. What do I remember about Christmas Eve? Chiefly that my father always read "A Night Before Christmas" (aka "A Visit from St. Nicholas") just before we children went to bed. My parents stayed up late wrapping and assembling gifts, but for me it was all about anticipation. Back then, Christmas was not even thought of (except by those needing to mail overseas packages) before Santa appeared at the end of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, and the month between then and Christmas seemed to me to stretch half a year. Since then, that time period has somehow shrunk to about half a week, even though the "Christmas season" now starts before Hallowe'en.

In my earliest years, we did not have a fireplace, and hung our stockings on our bedroom doorknobs. Somehow, Santa managed without a chimney.... When we moved to a house with fireplaces, the stockings, as I recall, still didn't hang in front of them. You see, we children were allowed to wake up very early and open our stockings; there was some lower limit to the hour, but it was early enough to please us and late enough to give our parents some much-need additional sleep. But we were not allowed to peek at the Christmas tree—so our stockings were hung on an upstairs railing.

I don't know when the gift inflation started, though it is undeniable. Our stockings were rather small—I remember mine being one of my father's old hiking boot socks—and did not hold a lot, but I don't ever remember being disappointed. (Oh yes; there was one year that I was. At one point my mother, in a bit of exasperation at my never-ending Christmas wish list, exclaimed, "You want the world with a string around it!" So I put that on my list. Lo and behold, in my stocking was a small bank in the shape of a globe, and my parents had attached a string to it. Today, I recognize it as a clever joke, but at the time I was bitterly disappointed that Santa had so misunderstood my request.) In addition to small toys and candy, in the toes of our stockings were always a small coin and a tangerine.

Our own children had huge stockings, hand knit by Porter's mother; they were always stuffed full, and the stocking gifts even spilled over onto the floor. Part of this was no doubt because we always had guests with us for Christmas, and everyone wanted to be Santa. Part was because societal expectations had greatly increased. I was aware of the inflationary pressure, and knew it was dangerous, but had very limited success in fighting it.

On Christmas morning, after we children had opened our stockings and spent some time playing with the toys inside, we were allowed to invade our parents' bedroom and show them our treasures, bringing their own stockings to them.

Next on the agenda was breakfast. I don't recall anything particularly special about Christmas breakfast, only that our parents took an unconscionable long time drinking their coffee! Eventually we persuaded them to finish their drinks in the living room, where the tree was. What a wonder! If there weren't as many presents there as our own children experienced, it certainly seemed an abundance to me. Especially after the family grew to six people. One thing I think we did better with our own children was our practice of opening only one gift at a time, so that everyone could enjoy everything. When I was growing up, my father often passed out gifts to multiple people simultaneously, so sometimes we missed seeing other people opening their presents. It did keep the event from lasting all day, however.

The rest of the day was glorious, as we relaxed and enjoyed all our gifts. Except, of course, for my mother, who spent time fixing Christmas dinner. Unlike Thanksgiving and Easter, the menu wasn't fixed: sometimes turkey, sometimes ham, often roast beef, but always something special.

I didn't discover until much later the joys of being in a church that celebrates the Church Year, where Christmas is not a day but a whole season, of 12 days—until Epiphany. I had happily sung, "The Twelve Days of Christmas" all my life without ever thinking about what that meant. So in our family the Christmas tree usually came down around New Year's Day. Nonetheless, for us children the holiday lasted nearly 12 days, as any time we had off from school was a holiday to us.

And that's a look at the year's holidays as I remember them from my youth. I hope some of you have enjoyed this look into the past as much as I did recalling it.

There are a lot of things about the good ol' days that I don't miss—smoking on airplanes is at the top of the list—but recently I was gloriously reminded of one of the benefits that we took for granted at the time: good showers.

I don't think anyone born after 1990 has any idea what a good shower feels like. For almost 25 years it has taken me twice as long as previously to take a shower, because the flow from today's emasculated nozzles is so weak. Maybe if you've stood under a waterfall, or a tropical rainstorm, you have an idea of the joy of a shower free from unnecessary regulation, but it's pure bliss after all this wimpy stuff, let me tell you.

As I stood under the shower, the thought crossed my mind: I know President Trump has a lot of more important things to think about, but I sure wish he'd get rid of the shower head restrictions.

I thought it was just a useless wish. But like my similar dreams that companies would get rid of the junk that fills much of our food, or that someone would take seriously the catastrophic rise in allergies, autism, ADHD, and other afflictions that have replaced measles, mumps, and chicken pox as parental concerns. But at last, we as a country are attempting to address those and other long-time concerns of mine, so I though maybe shower heads had a chance.

Lo and behold, today I learned that President Trump has already rescinded—not the original 1992 regulation of showerheads, which I would have preferred, but at least the subsequent re-interpretations of the rules that were considerably more onerous. I'll celebrate victories when I see them.

There are many ways to conserve resources. One size fits all rarely works well. I'll take shorter, more powerful showers; you're welcome to take longer, wimpier ones.

Maybe it's time to stimulate the economy by buying new showerheads. As long as they're made in America.

Make showers great again!

That's the bill for my first semester of college, in 1970. In 2024 dollars, that would be just under $16,000. (Inflation calculators differ, but not by much.)

Let's not look at the total bill, but annual tuition, which is easier to compare.

• Annual tuition at the University of Rochester in 1970: $2600 
• Approximate equivalent in 2024 dollars: $21,020
• Current annual tuition at the U of R: $65,870

Why is the inflation-adjusted cost of a college education at my alma mater more than three times what it was when I was there?

• Is the education three times better than it was then? (Highly doubtful.)
• Are the professors being paid three times as much? (Not the ones I know.)
• Are the graduates earning three times the salaries? (A quick investigation indicates the entry-level salaries for a position similar to my first job in 1974 are, adjusted for inflation, very similar to mine back then. But that's far from the whole story. I was in a tech field—computing, the early days—where one could easily expect a salary that justified the cost of college. How many of today's graduates can say the same? Today, far more students are "attending college," but studying what they should have learned in high school, and graduating with degrees that give them little hope of commensurate employment.)
• After four years of college, are today's graduates that much more mature, responsible, capable, well-read, well-rounded, generally competent, and prepared for adulthood—employment, marriage, parenthood, and contributing to society? Are they happier and more well-adjusted than we were? (A small minority are very impressive. But for far too many, college has been a tragic waste of both precious time and an obscene amount of money.)

If the parents in each generation always or often knew what really goes on at their sons’ schools, the history of education would be very different. — C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 70 years ago

Eventually parents are going to wake up to what a poor job colleges are doing. — a math professor friend, 25 years ago

When is this bubble going to burst? — me, now.

I've made no secret of the fact that I don't like the movie Forrest Gump.  The era of the late 60's and early 70's was a really weird time for our country (and much of the Western world): uncomfortable, ugly, deranged, disagreeable, void of reason and sense.  Quite a bit like the last decade or so, in fact.  Watching Forrest Gump brought all that back, and I appreciated neither the reminder nor what I believe was an attempt to whitewash the times.

You'd think I'd have the same reaction to Pirates of Silicon Valley, which I watched recently, since it deals with some of the same era.  But I enjoyed it thoroughly.  Here's the descritpion from Eric Hunley's Unstructured.

Pirates of Silicon Valley is a 1999 American biographical drama television film directed by Martyn Burke and starring Noah Wyle as Steve Jobs and Anthony Michael Hall as Bill Gates. Spanning the years 1971–1997 and based on Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine's 1984 book Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer, it explores the impact that the rivalry between Jobs (Apple Computer) and Gates (Microsoft) had on the development of the personal computer. The film premiered on TNT on June 20, 1999.

Two things made this a movie I would enjoy watching again.  One is that it shows the good, the bad, and the ugly of that era without either oversensationalizing it or making excuses.  The Promethean heroes who brought the power of computers to Everyman were severely flawed, but they were still heroes.

Even more than that, I loved the movie because it brought back good memories, especially at the beginning.  The early days of computing were messy, but they were also exciting.  I still remember sitting in a small room at the University of Rochester's Goler House, listening to Carl Helmers expounding on the wonders of the Apple 1 computer, which he demonstrated using a cassette tape as an input device.  Porter and I looked at each other and said, "I want to buy stock in this company!" Unfortunately, Apple was not publicly traded then, and when it did go public, we were out of the loop and missed the IPO of $22/share and the chance to turn $1000 into $2.5 million.  (My father did the same thing when he chose to buy our first house instead of investing the money in Haloid, as recommended by a friend who had just visited the company.  Haloid later became Xerox.)  We didn't get rich, but we did enjoy being on the fringes of the wild-and-woolly frontier.

There is a lot about the Ukraine, and Ukrainian history, that we don't know. I remember that shortly after we became involved in the current war, a wise, knowledgeable, and well-travelled Swiss friend remarked that he couldn't understand why the United States would get involved; he saw little difference between Russia and the Ukraine, and did not think it any of our business—to get mired in such a dispute would be plain foolishness on our part.

Well, when has that ever stopped us? All the wars in my own experience, beginning with Vietnam, have been characterized by (1) Pre-war meddling, on our part, in the internal politics of one or more of the countries involved; (2) Ignorance, at the highest levels, of the history and culture and customs of the peoples and places we were fighting; and (3) An unaccountable tendency to avoid at all costs either losing or winning, but to drag the conflict on and on, at great expense and loss of life. Our involvement in the Ukraine—which goes back much further than the most recent conflict—is just another in a long line of inexplicable American policies.

I recently came upon an e-mail written by my father in May of 1994. I doubt it sheds any light on our present predicament, but provides a quick snapshot of the Ukrainian situation thirty years ago. My father had not, to my knowledge, been in the Ukraine himself, but he had visited not only Poland, but also Yakutsk in Siberia, through the Elderhostel program (now called Road Scholar).

I want to quote from a letter I got from one of the couples who was in Poland with me. After their Elderhostel, they did some more traveling in Poland and then went to the Ukraine to try to find some of the roots of their daughter-in-law. They went to Kiev and Ternopil and they wrote their observations of both Poland and Ukraine. As far as Poland is concerned, they concluded that in spite of lots of problems, Poland will make it. This is a conclusion that I would not argue with. But as far as Ukraine is concerned, they wrote:

Ukraine is a much different situation. They used to have jobs and some stability in their lives. Now their government is gone and nothing has replaced it. The infrastructure is crumbling. They don't know who is in charge. There are no experienced emerging leaders. They have a temporary currency, and they don't know what it will be worth tomorrow. Factories are shutting down; unemployment is rising. The people are very despondent. They are losing hope.

That is the sort of situation that can lead to all sorts of problems. As I recall, Ukraine declared its independence when the Soviet Union collapsed, as did Yakutia. But I saw no such problems in Yakutia when I was there. On the other hand I am not sure that Yakutia tried to be as independent as Ukraine.

The Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) was recognized as such in 1992. It is the largest republic in Russia. Whatever Yakutia may have tried for in the way of complete independence, Dad was probably right. Despite high levels of poverty, a miserable war draining Russia's economy, and an awful climate, I suspect they are still in considerably better shape than the Ukraine.

I'm terrible about organizing and identifying photos and memorabilia. My intentions are good, but follow-through abysmal. I keep working on it, but the rate at which objects join the queue far exceeds the rate at which they are processed. I'm so grateful for (1) location stamps on my pictures—whatever the risks are of letting Google know where I am, the benefits for photo identification are immeasurable. And (2) Google Lens and Image Search. The unidentified photo of me as a little girl standing next to some monument? My father wasn't much better than me at keeping up with the documentation, but Google told me immediately that I was on top of Mt. Greylock in Massachusetts! Still, it's a very long and sometimes tedious job, and I just keep putting one foot in front of the other. My goal is to collate photos, memorabilia, and writings into a compact collection that people (i.e. family members) will enjoy looking at. The state it's all in now, if it falls into the hands of my executors, most of it will get tossed. If it's a hard job for me, it will be impossible for them. And I'm not getting any younger.

No pressure.

First, there's all my immediate family's stuff, which has been accumulating since we got married nearly 50 years ago. A couple of dozen large photo books with the pictures in chronological order (good) but largely unlabelled (terrible). Boxes of memorabilia that will be invaluable for identifying photos and for piecing together stories, even if most will eventually be tossed (before or after scanning). Carousels and boxes of old slides, which was the film medium of choice in our earlier days. Eighty thousand digital photos to sift through, label, and organize. The older photos take longer to process, as they need to be digitized and identification is much more difficult. The early digital photos don't need to be scanned, but they include very little identifying information. The pictures we took after getting our smart phones in 2014 are much easier to process because of included date and location data, but make up for that in sheer volume.

That's imposing enough. But as a firstborn (and thus more likely to be able to make identifications of older people and places), and even more as the resident genealogist (who cares the most about family history), I have become the repository for over 100 years worth of old photos (mostly unidentified) and memorabilia, from both my side of the family and my husband's. It has been accumulating in my closet for decades. And I mean accumulating; boxes and boxes that looked good because they were neatly stacked, but inside, all was chaos. I've been ignoring them because other projects have had higher priority, and—let's be honest—because I've been too intimidated to begin.

Recently, however, I girded my loins and pulled the first box out of the closet. I had decided that if I would just get everything roughly sorted by family and era, it would be easier to tackle the smaller chunks (certainly a relative term) piecemeal. That's the theory, anyway.

I began by going through all the boxes and sorting the contents into very rough piles.

It gets worse. What you see here doesn't begin to reveal why I suddenly felt completely overwhelmed when I ought to have been rejoicing in having made a start.

In addition to a lot of stuff that I know I'm going to discard, I found treasure. In particular, a large stack of notebooks containing further journals kept by my father, of which I had been unaware. I had already scanned and organized the 15 journals that I knew about, and that was quite a project in itself. It was thrilling to find more, from the later years; not so thrilling that they were written in unorganized spiral notebooks—here a little, there a little—sometimes in the kind of pen that bleeds over onto the other side.

Plus I found stacks of Dad's letters to the family and essays (with photos) of the many Elderhostel programs he had enjoyed. Dad was a prolific writer and a good one, and it's amazing to read what he wrote about life during our childhood years. I know better than to think I will be able to read them all as carefully as I would like. But I really want to scan them, and do some minimal image editing to make the faded text more legible, so that they will be available, especially to my younger siblings, whose activities they cover more than my own. My first thought had been to toss the Elderhostel writings, but it turns out they make interesting reading, and I think are worth preserving. Maybe that's the writer in me, reluctant to let go of any good writing, or the dutiful daughter who finds value in her father's thoughts. But at least one person in the family has expressed an interest in reading the stories—if they were in an organized form. And most of his letters are worth preserving, being another source of family history.

At one point I hoped to transcribe the journals and letters—and I have my own hand-written journals in addition to his. Why? For the same reason I like to have e-book versions of books (as well as physical copies of my favorites): The ability to search the text. (How old was my brother when he had the chicken pox?) Plus, in the case of handwritten originals, a transcribed version would be much easier and more pleasant to read. My father's handwriting is even harder to decipher than my own, if only because I generally wrote in manuscript, and he in cursive. However, I gave up the transcription dream for two reasons: (1) I'm not planning to live to 150, and (2) I have hopes that Artificial Intelligence, whatever disasters it might bring, will soon be able to do a much better job than the transcription software currently available. So I content myself with digitizing the pages, and occasionally including keywords in the filenames.

This is a huge project (and perhaps a just penance for not keeping my own archivist work up-to-date over the years!) but at least I know that my siblings and children, having entrusted the job to me, are of necessity all on board with my throwing away whatever I can't justify keeping. But that's a big responsibility, too, and one I find particularly difficult. Throwing out items that I figure I may someday want l is not my strong suit. What keeps me going is knowing that it all will be lost if I don't get it into a manageable state.

I took on the job because I care about family history—and possibly because I'm the eldest. First-born's burden, I suppose.

One. Step. At. A. Time.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s historic speech brought to mind this entry from my father's journals.

June 5, 1968

For the first time in months I turned on the radio during breakfast this morning to hear the outcome of the primary election in California, and learned with a shock that Senator Kennedy had been shot. It seems inconceivable that so many people have taken to shooting people they disagree with, and that to so many the end seems to justify the means. Somehow, things have got to get back on the right track.

I suspect something is wrong with our food, as well as our habits of living.

Reading my father's journals from 1959 to 1970, I noticed in particular something about our eating habits: we ate dessert three times a day. We had lunch dessert, dinner dessert, and bedtime dessert. I remember trying hard to convince my parents that we should logically have breakfast dessert as well, but was overruled. Probably because breakfast in those days was all too often sweet enough to be dessert in itself. True, we didn't have pre-sweetened cereal, but we had sugar in a bowl on the table....

And yet we were not overweight, much less obese. Not thin, but a healthy weight. Moreover, not one of us ever worked out at a gym or had any kind of regular exercise program. Ordinary living kept us in decent shape. My father was an engineer with a desk job; my mother a homemaker.

What made the difference? I can only guess.

I'm convinced that our food was both healthier and tastier. After all, I am older than McDonald's. Milk from a local dairy was delivered in glass bottles to our front porch; it was pasteurized, but not homogenized. Meat came from local butchers; I liked it best from the Jewish butcher, because then I was allowed to nibble on the raw ground beef, as we knew it had not been in contact with any pork products. (Pork was an exception to "food was healthier back then"; trichinosis was still a big problem, caused by pigs being fed raw pork, or so I was told.)

We didn't have farmers' markets back then; what we had instead was nearby farms that sold some of their produce at stands along the road. Their fruits and vegetables were only available in season, but they sure were fresh, and clearly superior to what the grocery stores sold. Our food didn't have nearly the variety we have today, but it was enough, and it was good. There's a blessing in being able to have access to food flown in from halfway across the world, and ethnic restaurants on every corner, but overall, thanks to agricultural mass production, it doesn't have the flavor it once had.

Consciously or unconsciously, we undoubtedly eat more quantity in an effort to make up for lost quality.

The other big difference that I remember in our food is portion size. At home, we always had plenty to eat, but common sense, both nutritionally and financially, kept the portions quite a bit smaller than is common today, even at home. And restaurant portions are ridiculous now! When I was growing up, restaurant meals were very rare occasions, and fast food almost non-existent. Even in restaurants the portions were much smaller than today. I had my first McDonald's hamburger during college; it cost 23 cents and, if memory serves, was half the size of a quarter-pounder today.

One thing we didn't do much of was snacking. Except for a small bit of milk-and-cookies after school, which was primarily valuable for the debriefing/decompressing time spent in the kitchen while my mother prepared dinner, eating between meals was considered unnecessary and even unhealthy.

Did I mention that we mostly ate at home? The food itself was largely home-prepared.  Store-bought cookies, box cake mixes, pre-prepared salads, frozen meals—all either non-existent or considered far inferior to homemade. (Exception: Girl Scout cookies.)  [Update:  Thanks to Porter for catching my egregious misstatement, as I had orginally written "superior"! Not, I assure you, a Freudian slip.]

Then there was exercise. If there were fitness establishments, I never saw one. Gym class in school was for fun, not fitness: tumbling, marching, and playing games (including dodge ball) where winning was not of primary importance. There were no formal team sports that I remember before high school, though pick-up games of all sorts were common in our neighborhood, which abounded with playmates of all ages. Winter or summer, we were outside and active. Avid bookworm that I was, I still spent much of my spare time outside, either playing with my friends or wandering the fields and woods near our house. As I said, my father had a sedentary job, but walked for transport when he could (sometimes wearing snowshoes in the winter), played games in the yard with us and the neighborhood kids who congregated there, and—though not as often as he would have liked—took us hiking in his beloved Adirondack mountains. There was also a good place to swim that was only an eight-minute drive from home, so you can bet that in those days without air conditioning swimming was a frequent summertime activity. Plus, he and my mother (occasionally helped by us kids), spent a lot of time gardening. Not farming, just ordinary suburban gardening, but everything was done by hand. Sawing wood, digging holes, planting bushes, roses, flowers, and even the occasionable vegetables, though the latter were much more efficiently obtained directly from the farms. Then there was mowing the lawn: keep in mind that this is what our lawn mower looked like:

I don't mean to imply that our situation was ideal. We were in a time of transition, and definitely headed in an unhealthy direction, but we were not all the way there yet when I was young. Both society at large, and the medical profession in particular, had already given up on breastfeeding and thought bottle-feeding with a concoction of sterilized water, evaporated milk, and corn syrup was the superior way to go. Someone with more financial sense than taste buds then introduced our generation to the instant orange-flavored drink known as Tang, and as a teenager I downed Carnation Instant Breakfast before going off to school. Unbelievably, these abominations still exist today.

But for a while, in my childhood, we ate nutritious foods full of natural natural flavors, and spent a lot of active time outdoors (without sunscreen). We even survived having regular bedtime dessert.

This story from my father's journals shows that air travel technology may have changed a lot in the past 50 years, but travel delays are much the same. What I find most interesting was the complete lack of airport security, not even checking the passengers' tickets for boarding, and thus not realizing that they were trying to board more passengers than there were seats on the plane. Also that there was another plane, with crew, available to accommodate the supererogatory passengers.

June 30, 1967, complete with foreshadowing. He was travelling from Philadelphia to Albany, New York.

This morning as I left for work it was raining hard, and at the time looked as though I could have trouble flying home tonight, if there were no change in the weather. The rain stopped sometime during the morning, however, and by the time I caught a taxi to the airport about 6:30 this evening, the weather posed no problem. I walked to the 30th Street station to get the cab because it was not obvious I would get one in front of the GE building. Traffic was quite heavy as we started out toward the airport, but was not really bad as we neared the airport. Apparently most of the traffic was made up of people heading for the beach.

The airport terminal was crowded, however, and I had a 5 or 10 minute wait before I could get a seat in the coffee shop and a much longer wait before I got my dinner. The coffee shop at the Philadelphia Airport is not the place to go for a quick meal. I had plenty of time, however, as my plane did not leave until 8:20.

My flight to Kennedy Airport was on National Airlines, and was uneventful, although the plane was full. But at Kennedy I saw the biggest crowd I have ever seen around an airport. I chose to walk to the Mohawk counter, which is in the building diametrically opposite the National terminal, and I found the roads, and many of the parking lots, filled to overflowing. The traffic was bumper to bumper and crawling on most of the roads, and the parking lots near the National terminal were not only jammed, but overflowing, with cars parked on sidewalks, and double-parked in ways that blocked other cars from getting out. Things were not quite so bad near the Mohawk-Eastern building, but were still quite crowded. A good percentage of the crowd were servicemen—showing without a doubt the influence of the Vietnam war.

At the Mohawk counter I was informed that because of a radar failure at Kennedy, my Mohawk flight would leave from LaGuardia and I should go to Gate 1 or 2 at 10:15 where a bus would take me to LaGuardia. So I called Lynn and told her the story and suggested that she call Mohawk before she went to the airport to meet me. It was obvious that we would be quite late.

The bus for LaGuardia was boarded, not at 10:15, but at 10:45, and after wending its way by devious routes, it arrived at LaGuardia and we were deposited at the Mohawk terminal with no indication of what to do next. Before long, however, an announcement said that our flight was boarding at Gate 25. What it meant was that it would eventually board at Gate 25.

After some delay, we boarded the plane with absolutely no checking of our tickets. As the plane became more and more crowded, the stewardess asked people to move forward and sit down, and she was greeted with the news that there were no more seats. Eventually, the plane was emptied, and all the passengers were loaded in a more orderly fashion on two planes. I gather that the problem was that an earlier flight from LaGuardia had been cancelled, and its passengers put on my flight on a standby basis, but somewhere along the line, the stand-by status got lost. Fortunately, there were two planes and crews available.

The upshot of all this activity (or, at times, inactivity) was that I arrived at the Albany Airport at 1:30 a.m.

I'm not particularly aware of what parents and teachers worry about these days, having long passed that stage of life, but I know that for a long time, parents have been concerned that kids are not doing the things that concerned my generation's parents and teachers because we were actually doing them. Case in point: Reading.

For decades, schools have found it necessary to push children to read books. And I can see why, given the number of adults who simply don't read books, once they are done with school. They weren't reading for pleasure back when they were captive students, but rather because books were assigned—so it's hardly surprising that they don't read now that they are free.

I hear responsible parents these days admonishing their children, "Put down your phone/iPad/Nintendo and go read a book!" Or so I'm told; maybe they've given up by now. But I'm sure the schools are still telling kids to read. Pretty sure, at least.

That's not what I heard growing up. My parents were both avid readers, but I was more likely to hear, "Put down that book and go outside!" That wasn't exactly onerous, at least not when we lived in Upstate New York with a large, undeveloped section of land just across the street from our house. I spent nearly as many happy hours exploring the woods and fields as I spent exploring the worlds of my books. "Put down that book and get your chores done" was not quite as welcome a call.

Side Note: Our parents may have had a point.  Here's something my dad wrote after I visited the eye doctor for a yet stronger glasses prescription.

Dr. O’Keefe never offers any advice for arresting Linda’s rapidly increasing near-sightedness except to make her get outdoors more and not let her bury her nose in a book.  I think that we really need some advice that is better thought out. [More than 20 years later, the doctors could do no better than this when our eldest daughter was experiencing the same problem.]

Teachers and parents these days (where by "these days" I'm referring to anything after about 1980) have been so desperate to get kids to read that they have lowered their standards and expectations almost as if this were a limbo contest. "I don't care what he reads, as long as he's reading."

Contrast this with my mother, who tried to enlist the help of our elementary school librarian to get me to read something more challenging than the horse stories and science fiction I was devouring. Or my sixth grade teacher, who solemnly advised my father that "Linda should improve the quality of her reading." I'm certain that he was correct; I'm equally certain that my father's attempts to encourage me in that direction, beginning with bringing home from the library a Jules Verne compendium, were not a resounding success.

Reading has always been my passion, and in my eighth decade I have not yet outgrown horse stories and science fiction. However, I think even my sixth grade teacher would be pleased with my much-expanded selections. It's possible that the most credit for my habit of reading should go to the fact that we did not have a television in the house until I was seven years old, nor a computer till after I was married.

One thing I know for sure: there will always be an X, a Y, and parents and teachers who will exhort their children, "Stop doing X and go do Y."

If you are not among those of our family and friends who are travelling to view the solar eclipse, or who are lucky enough to live in the path of totality, you can still enjoy this facsimile. (Image found on Facebook.)

Here in Florida we are a lot further away from the path of totality than on March 7, 1970, when I lived in Philadelphia and the path was just off the coast. Here's how my father described it then:

On Saturday we watched the eclipse by focussing the light from the sun on a piece of paper through half of our binoculars. It worked well, and the progress of the moon was very clear. At the darkest, it looked like a heavily overcast day outside, so it was not really impressive for this time of the year, but what we didn't see here we did see on television.

I love my dad's sense of humor.

Here's another story from his journals, this time from a four-week cross-country car trip we took in the summer of 1968. When we weren't visiting relatives, we camped in a small tent-trailer, at inexpensive campgrounds. Some were wonderful, most were fine, and a few were less so. Of the North Woods Motor Court and Campground, which as far as I can tell no longer exists, Dad said,

It looks like the owner is fixing things up in his spare time, and he hasn't had much spare time.

There were only two picnic tables, and one bathroom. But with only four families staying, that worked out all right, and we were just thrilled to be camping on green grass for the first time in quite a while. It's only worth writing about because Dad's comment makes me laugh.

And also because this campground was the scene of our Great Skunk Adventure, but that is another story.

Here's another observation from reading my father's journals, this one from April 1963.

About 11 a.m. I went out to the car to go out to the Research Lab and the car ('57 Ford) wouldn't start. It was not firing at all. I spent the better part of the lunch hour convincing myself there was no spark. Blackie (the guard at the Building 37 gate) called the man from the GE garage who diagnosed it as a bad condenser.

Since he was not in a position to make repairs, I called the AAA for the first time in years. On the telephone I told the girl that it was not a dead battery and that the trouble had been diagnosed as a bad capacitor. I had hoped this would at least forewarn the man who came, even though he would no doubt want to make his own diagnosis. So in about half an hour he showed up with the question, "What's the matter? Dead battery?"

All he would do was to diagnose the trouble as a bad coil and tow me somewhere. I had him tow me to Dorazio's service station where I left the car to get yet another diagnosis.

Fifty years later and customer service experiences don't look much different. Especially if you try to give them information or ask them to go off-script. After much phone time and several questionable attempts at a fix, a well-known bank is still sending us multiple copies of each e-mail, and they are not interested in hearing what we already know about the problem.

From Dad's journals, January 1967

This happened at a meeting for Girl Scout parents:

The main purpose of the meeting was to discuss finances for the European trip, but Mrs. B. did mention that as a part of their challenge work, they had had some discussions of dating. Questions had come up like "How far do you let a boy go on a first date?" and "What is heavy petting?" Apparently one of the girls answered the questions in hair-raising detail as she had been told from a senior girl. Mrs. B. felt that the girls needed answers to some of these questions, but were hesitant to ask their parents, so she was suggesting we have a talk with our daughters. Then she turned to me and said, "You don't have to worry about Linda—she said that if she had a million dollars she would buy a science lab and lock herself in."

That's not what I would do with a million dollars now, but I still think it was a reasonable answer.

I enjoy reading these journals both when Dad describes events that I remember in clear detail, and those—like this one—of which I remember nothing at all.

This excerpt from my dad's journals is personal, and has to do with my parents' attempts to encourage me to be a normal, American girl. I still don't know why they would have wanted that; neither one of them was normal, at least not in the sense of average. Don't get me wrong: they were great people.  But my mother was a mathematician and my father an engineer, which put them pretty clearly in the square-peg-in-round-hole category. What did they expect of me?

In this case, the round hole involved dancing.

As far back as I can remember, I have had no interest whatsoever in dancing. I don't know why. I'm not nor have I ever been a Baptist or one of those other denominations that discourages the practice; I simply don't care for it. At various times in my life, other people have attempted to fix this defect in my character, all with negative results. As far as I can recall, this was the first such effort. I was in eighth grade.

Tonight Linda started taking dancing lessons at the YWCA—somewhat reluctantly, I think, but I cannot be sure. Mrs. L. called Lynn to see if Linda was interested since she was signing up [her daughter] E., and Lynn agreed, primarily on the basis that if Linda wants to go to the Spring Dance, she should know how to dance. Linda argues that she does not need to know how to dance to go to the Spring Dance. But whether she is really as reluctant as she would like to let on, I don't know.

Yes, well yes, I was. Reluctant. And if I had ever expressed any interest in the Spring Dance, which I doubt, it was probably something I had accepted as one of the many stupid things school tried to impose on us, and I had not yet learned the lesson of "Do not affirm. Do not comply." Besides, my friends were doing it. (Surely one of the worst reasons ever for doing something stupid, but I digress.)

I don't blame my parents for pushing me to do things I didn't like, any more than I blame them for trying to get me to like beets. I finally won the beet battle when they realized that every bite of beets I swallowed was likely to come back up, quickly. But sometimes a little push can open up new and delightful experiences. And apparently I was notoriously hard to read: Dad's journals are filled with comments like, "Once again, I have no idea whether Linda enjoyed the experience or not."

I survived the dance lessons, I think without permanent trauma. I even tried one more time, in a ballroom dance class at the University of Rochester. That didn't take, either.

For the record, the U of R also offered folk dancing classes. (These, like the ballroom dancing, were informal, not regular college courses.) To this, I had the diametrically opposite response. I LOVED folk dancing. I can't say I was very good at it, but that didn't matter, because it was so much fun! Why? I'm not sure; it was a long time ago. But I know I enjoyed the music, and the lively movement, and I especially enjoyed the fact that everyone danced together, without being matched up, except briefly, with any particular partner.

Have I ever tried to find folk dancing again? I did once investigate a local club, but was put off by the fact that everyone was required to bring a partner to the meetings—so it was obvious that it was not the kind of dancing I was looking for. Besides, the last thing I need is yet another activity in my life. I'm really quite happy being dance-free!

(But I'm still not inclined to become a Baptist.)