Home again, home again, 4-5-6

Yesterday, after I finished helping bro in-law with the install I left him with the clean up. I had finished the job of building several white boards and had enough of his attitude. He's a piece of work to work with but that's another story.

I diverted on my way home to drive by, to see if I could find some more memories, the house we moved to when we sold the store (see last post). I found it without too much effort, had tried once before but the impatient one wanted to just get to destination the last time we were close.

Drove past the house and then drove up to the school. It was a brand new school in 1965 and I had expectations of electric pencil sharpeners and all that James Bond technology of the sixties. Not to be had, we had manual pencil sharpeners, a same old black board (they were green but called "Black Boards"). If you got all your work done in class you got to clean the erasers at the end of the day and socialize with the teacher, an evangelical minister who was warm and charming. I loved cleaning the brushes and listening to his stories. We had lockers, full size ones and the best teacher I had ever had.

On Mondays I could never remember my combination to the padlock that guarded my coat and lunch. The smell would gag a maggot after a long weekend. Our intra-mural teams were named after automobiles, the muscle cars of the sixties. There were Mustangs, they always won and Barrcudas, I was a Stingray, a car I still pine for.

The neighborhood has grown up, filled in. The bush where I had built a fort is now houses, I had made my first hardware store purchase, a small bag of nails, to attach the hand cut trees to the carefully surveyed "corner post" trees and the hill where I first became airborne, on a toboggan, is now a not so steep back yard to a newer house.

Last night I went to a YMCA fund raiser, my friend the realtor invited me as she is member and on the fund raising committee, I was to meet her there but as is the case with real estate agents (my dad was one) she was busy. Not that it mattered, I suspected she'd be busy, I had talked to her on the phone earlier and she was doing the one armed paper hanger drill. I wandered around the gym where they had set up several booths, trade show style to display the programs they had. I stopped at each one and diligently filled out my "passport". If you completed the passport by answering each booth's question, you could enter the draw for an X-box game setup (I don't really need an X-box but hey, it was fun chatting at each stop).
At the fitness booth was a charming lady that took my vital statistics and when I stated my age said "that's a nice age", she commented that I was quite fit ( I need to lose a few pounds to get away from borderline "overweight" according to the chart she had for BMI indexes). We chatted and she said she works as a fitness trainer at the Y and come and see her in the workout area some time.

I think I'll start working out a bit more. At the Y.