The Good Old Days

Working on my book in the cool, air-conditioned comfort of the house is an escape from more than the heat. I can see how people of a certain age might prefer the past over the present. A nostalgic view of the good old days is infinitely more appealing than present day reality.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not talking about my current personal circumstances. My life is rich with blessings too numerous to list here.

I'm talking more about societal change and current events. The world is not the same place it was even 25 years ago. Are we better off? In some ways, yes. But overall, even with all the advances, I'm not so sure.

Return to ANY attraction in the United States you visited more than 25 years ago, if it's still there. It doesn't matter what it is--national park, museum, amusement park or vacation spot. I guarantee you the quality of the experience has declined.

You'll pay out the nose and be herded along with a huge group of equally disappointed and often ill-mannered tourists. They'll crowd around exhibits, heedless of those around them. Get close enough to actually see and someone will soon shove you out of the way. You end up paying a ton of money to see people looking at things you can't actually see yourself.

God forbid you get hungry or thirsty. The options are nearly identical no matter where you go and completely bereft of any nutritional value. You'll stand in long lines and pay a small fortune for a bottle of water and a lukewarm hotdog on a soggy or chewy bun.

The quaint seaside restaurant you loved 25 years ago is still there, but has expanded and now caters to tour buses. The food resembles the sumptuous fare served long ago in name only. Get 'em in, get 'em out, ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching.

Remember helpful sales people who actually knew something about the stuff they sold? Or how about when flying was a fun and relaxing way to reach your destination? Or how about customer service anywhere, really.

Today individual chain stores are managed by people who don't care. Surly kids with bad attitudes got fired when I worked at those places. Now good workers are so hard to find, just showing up is good enough.

Dad grew up with a kind of freedom I never knew. I grew up with a kind of freedom my niece and nephew will never know. We did our own thing in ways no longer possible. We had to come up with our own ideas for how to fill our time.

Today you even join groups to do your own thing. Nobody is alone with their thoughts anymore. Can't have that. Gotta stay plugged in to something.

I think I'll answer the siren call of my book. It's nice looking back. Hard to believe I haven't always been...

The Crotchety Old Man

Winter-Lite for Me, Thanks

Winter has never been my favorite time of year. Early on there were times I enjoyed snow and cold weather. But my ability to even endure, much less enjoy cold weather has steadily declined with age.

The most fun I ever had in the snow was in grade school, sledding down the hill near our house. Our new neighborhood was skipped by salt trucks and plows a few times. As luck would have it, extremely hazardous roads make for great sledding. Turning on the fire hydrant at the top of the hill made for an even icier surface.

I prayed for snow days in junior high. Not only did a snow day mean staying home from school, it also allowed me to make money shoveling snow from sidewalks and driveways. An early start allowed me to finish a job or two before the sun put me out of business.

Getting a driver's license completely changed my view of snow days. Permission to drive the family car was hard enough to get on the best of days. Throw in snow and ice and the best I could hope for was a trip to an empty parking lot for an unwanted driving lesson from the most impatient man on the planet. Fun.

My dislike for cold weather intensified in college. Because the majority of students lived on campus, the University of Kentucky almost never closed. Driving in for class during and after snow storms was bad enough. After a while, the very idea of walking between classes in subzero weather with gale force winds was enough to keep me from leaving my comfy, warm bed.

Snow is a rare visitor to Athens. When it snows here everything closes. Most of the time it's gone by noon. Last year we got nearly a foot of snow and it stayed around for several days. The big snow this year was gone two days later.

I'm grateful for our southern snow. You know--the kind of snow that pops in just long enough to say hello before going away. I hope that's it for this year. Otherwise, I turn into...

The Crotchety Old Man

The Bounty of Christmas Past

Growing up, Christmas was the one day of the year you could count on our family being home. Any other day we could be anywhere. But Christmas we were home.

Mom's presents were wrapped and under the tree well before Christmas, with gifts from Santa securely hidden nearby. Dad usually did most of his shopping in the days before Christmas Eve. He'd come home, drag bags down the back steps and spend the rest of the day wrapping presents in the basement.

I got everybody up Christmas morning. Well, not directly. But I did coerce my sister into asking my parents if we could get up. Most of the time it was still too early. We'd go back to bed and ask again 15 minutes later. I did sleep until 7 one year, but was in my 20s at the time.

Santa artfully arranged gifts for me and my sister on either side of the tree. Everything was fully assembled and ready for action. When we were little the displays rivaled anything seen in department store windows. To my knowledge, no pictures were ever taken.

After gifts from Santa had been admired it was time to open the rest of the presents. The shear volume made taking turns impractical. Instead, we all tore in with abandon. It was all over in 30-minutes or less.

Then we had a couple of hours to enjoy the Christmas bounty before guests arrived for dinner. You never put stuff up because everyone coming over wanted to see the gifts. This practice started when we were young and continued out of habit well beyond the time anyone cared what we got.

By the time guests arrived we were cleaned up, wearing new clothes and reeking of new soaps, shampoos and colognes. Grannie and some of our relatives from Dad's side of the family hit our house for early dinner, and my Aunt Doris's house for a late dinner. Mom's family tended to drop by after dinner for an evening of the latest board games.

Dinner was always the same, give or take a side. Turkey, country ham, dressing, mashed potatoes, scalloped oysters, sweet potatoes, green beans, corn pudding, gravy, Waldorf salad, cranberry sauce, and brown-n-serve rolls. Grannie usually brought chocolate meringue pies and tons of her homemade candy and fudge.

After dinner we spent the day playing with new toys and games. Board games were a constant, with favorites changing as we got older and as new games came along. Sometimes somebody even took the time to read the rules, but mostly we just made it up as we went along. Good times were had by all.

Merry Christmas!

Pedophiles, Gays, and Boy Scouts of America

My scoutmaster was a pedophile. We didn't know for a long time. He wasn't married and spent every penny he had on the troop. We went camping once a month year round, and twice a month in summer. We had the best equipment you could get and ate like kings. We camped in beautiful state parks all over Kentucky in summer and at nearby Camp McKee the rest of the year.

The troop was brand new and met less than a mile from my home in a new church. I already had my Tenderfoot from another troop, but had difficulty making it across town to monthly meetings. I jumped at the chance to join a troop closer to home. Since I already had my Tenderfoot and everyone else was a beginner, I was elected Senior Patrol Leader.

Everything was normal at first. Things changed very slowly as he gained our trust and got to know us better. He'd play a dirty tape (hot nuts) in his car for the "select" group that got to ride with him. We laughed whether we got the jokes or not. He smoked, and had no problems with us smoking. Later he'd bring beer along, though only a select few knew about it. You know, boy stuff--and boys will be boys. As far as I know drugs were never involved.

He invited me and the rest of the troop leaders to spend the night at his house the day before a big event so we could get an early start. Somehow I was the only one that came. He made a move, I cried, he stopped immediately, acted like nothing had happened, and neither of us ever mentioned it again. That night marked the end of my time in the select group.

After that he took the select group to cabins for fishing and hunting trips. Then it was hotel rooms, and the invitation list grew ever shorter. Eventually some of us older guys (we were like 14) talked with each other about encounters with him. We agreed not to say anything to anyone else because we didn't want to see the camping trips come to an abrupt end. Besides, it wasn't really hurting anyone, was it?

One of our younger boys hung himself. We went to the funeral home. I saw him laid out in the coffin and lost it. I was so upset that his mother had to comfort me. The guys I came with walked me back to the car. We sat in the parking lot of the funeral home and cried for a long time. I have often wondered if our scoutmaster had anything to do with it.

After my Eagle I got a job and became too busy for scouts. One of the parents called years later, when I was 20. A boy told his Mom about an incident, she called other Moms, more stories came out...the camping trips came to an abrupt end. I have no idea what happened to him but am pretty sure they told him to leave town or they'd call the cops. That was the last I ever heard about our scoutmaster.

The parents wanted me to take the troop to Camp McKee for a week. The boys had been looking forward to and preparing for it for months. That was the first and only time I ever participated in a real scout camp. The first morning the campsite inspectors arrived to find me and most of the 12 boys under my supervision sound asleep in sleeping bags in the midst of a camp site easily mistaken for a disaster area. By the end of the week, we won awards for earning the most merit badges and for the most improved camp site. I ended up staying on as a counselor for several weeks.

I have not burned my Eagle. Participation in boy scouts was good for me. Until very late in my scouting career I was blissfully unaware that our scoutmaster was anything less than an ideal role model. I was not molested, and for those of you who might be curious, had no sexual experiences of any kind with anyone on any of those camping trips. I was too naive to pick up on and/or too fearful to follow through with any opportunities I may have had.

I'm disappointed that BSA sees banning gays as the solution to the problem. Our scoutmaster wasn't gay. He was a pedophile. I can forgive you for thinking they are one in the same, because I once thought the same thing. That's a big part of the reason it took me so long to figure out and accept that I was gay.

My mother came to my defense for the first time when a friend told her to tell me to keep my hands out of her toddler sons pants. Had she called me a dirty fag Mom probably would have agreed. But that someone could think I would ever molest a child infuriated her. It was a break through moment for both of us.

The boy scouts are right to be concerned about sexual predators, but wrong in the assumption that gay men are pedophiles. The gay men I know want a REAL man, thank you very much, not a child. An out gay man doesn't have to sneak around. The ones you need to worry about hide behind marriages of convenience and otherwise pretend to be something they are not. It's just another one of those things that makes me....

The Crotchety Old Man

Summers Impossible Now

Summer was always my favorite time of year growing up. I left the house by 9 most mornings and would return around 5, usually just in time for supper. I'd snag lunch at the home of one of the many kids in the neighborhood my age, give or take a year or two. Then we'd be back to our adventure-of-the-day.

The street was new. There was always at least one house under construction--a child's delight at at every stage. We had a blast climbing up and sliding back down huge mounds of dirt from newly excavated basements. We swung from bare rafters, jumped through window frames, and climbed on the brick layers' scaffolding. After the dry wall went up we played hide and seek. Staying ever vigilant for parents, construction workers, and prospective buyers just made it that much more exciting.

I distinctly recall six different tree houses, each more impressive than the last, assembled from pilfered construction materials in huge trees on land we didn't own. There were also several caves--big holes covered with a piece of plywood in various locations in a big pasture at the end of our street. After they sold the farm, we took over a one-room shack left behind by a road crew. It was so far out that you could see anyone coming long before they would arrive.

The tree houses, caves and the construction shack were places to hang out. At least for me--I suspect some of the older kids had other uses for them. The fun part was identifying the need for a new place to hang out, scoping out possible locations, designing an appropriate space, pilfering the necessary tools and materials to build it and then working together to achieve the vision. The completed project never quite measured up to the vision--especially the unventilated caves and the windowless shack.

If it wasn't a school night, we'd rush through a silent supper (Dad always read the afternoon paper at the dinner table and conversation was forbidden) to rejoin our friends outside. Initially we had to come home when the street lights came on. When we got a little older, my parents turned the porch light on when it was time to come in.

We'd play in an empty house, hang out at or work on our newest digs, and otherwise occupy our time waiting for the sun to go down. Then we'd gather under the street light in the cul de sac at the end of the street to play kick the can. We'd designate an "it" who stacked the cans (we liked four with a coffee can base and a tomato paste can on top) then counted to 100 while we hid in the backyard of one of the seven houses on the cul de sac.

Being "it" was awful. With seven yards to hide in, you had to go behind houses to find people, leaving the cans vulnerable. You could catch a dozen or more people but someone almost always kicked the cans, setting everyone free. We played until eleven of twelve almost every night.

The childhood I had is just not an option for most kids today. We did things...lots of things on our own with no supervision from any parent or other adult. Can you imagine that happening today? Hardly. Makes me sad.

The Crotchety Old Man