IT'S A DOG'S WORLD AFTER ALL

These two look too much like people. In fact, they look a little like my wife and me. I'm the one on the right.

There's a dog park in Scottsdale and a dog beach on Coronado. I see dogs riding in cars all the time. Not just the small house pets, but the huge ones with ears flopping and tongues leaving stains on widows. Well, their juices anyhow.

I even see dogs in grocery stores. And that's about my limit. Unless they're Paris Hilton dogs that can hide away in purses. I just don't want to see a pooch in the store. There are too many displays where one raised leg could and would perhaps be appropriate, but uncalled for.

As many dogs that go public now, that is, out in public more, I'm surprised there are no dog fights. At least I don't hear of any. Heck, maybe the way we pamper our pets they have no aggression, no need to fight for turf or power or fun.

There's a reality show coming on tv on July 7 called America's Favorite Dog. I don't know how it works. I only know the winner. It's your dog.

THE FOURTH, OR HALFWAY FROM PARADISE

When I taught students, rather than teaching school, I mean that's like saying the preacher preaches church, July 4 was a benchmark. It marked the downside to Summer.

From then on out, Summer flew and school began again. Of course, that was in the olden times when students only went to school 9 months and never in the revered Summer unless they needed to make up credits. The only time I went to Summer school was to take Driver's Training because of my late in the year birthday. Most of my classmates had been driving since they were second semester sophs, but not me. So I had to take Behind-the Wheel in the Summer.

But when I sat on the other side of the desk, I valued Summer even more. Well, for 20 years I taught Summer school for 8 weeks for both semesters. Sometimes they overlapped with additional education courses I was taking, too, but none of that ever got too much in the way of Summer. That's what I lived for.

And then Those In The Know decided that year-round school would panaceacally solve student low achievement. They forgot what they had learned over the Summer. So let's stagger the school year and give them two week breaks and five or six weeks only for Summer.

That's not enough time. To get fat with Summer. To run through fields of green as the song goes. To, yes, forget about school. To socialize. To go to camps. To go camping. To listen to a ballgame late into the night, or better yet to go an out of town ballgame and get home at 2:00 AM.

Yet as much fun as July 4 activities were, I knew that before I knew it, stores would be advertising Back to School sales, and before long I would have to make that dreaded walk back up the stairs to my classroom. The first bell would be a death toll to Summer.

COKES IN GLASS BOTTLES WITH PEANUTS INSIDE THEM

Sung to "These Are A Few of my Favorite Things". Well, they're better than a dog bite and bee sting.

After Little League games, we would sit in the stands and watch the next game and drink the terrific mixture. We probably didn't even wash our hands after our game. But they never made contact with the peanuts which went directly into the coke bottle. All that was left was a good shake of the bottle to start the flow of the fizz. We didn't know much about carbonation, but when we shook the bottle we had a mini-volcanic reaction. The only way to stop it was to let the liquid hit the roof of our mouth. Why the peanuts didn't fly and choke us was a matter of physics we didn't understand; they just didn't. So we did it.

It seems like Coke had much more carbonation then. Remember when if you drank it too fast it would sting your nose? Remember when it would make you burp? I haven't had a Coke, re-phrase, a Diet Coke do that to me for years. And syrupy fountain cokes; well, they can be just terrible. And canned Coke? It's terrible, and tastes to me like the aluminum it's cased in.

Since wine supposedly gets better with age, I wonder if Cokes do. Now, I know about fermentation. And I know about flatness. But if somewhere, someone had an old Coke bottle made when Cokes were really Cokes, and if it was kept in an ideal temperature setting, if it would be the same.

Hey, I have a celebratory championship Coke bottle from the Cardinals World Championship. I could pop that open and test my theory. I could add peanuts. I could even go watch my grandsons play baseball. But, then again, the bottle is from 1982. Coke had stopped being Coke by then.

COULDN'T SEE, COULD FEEL

I knew you dropped all sorts of things.

Names of those who you knew,

The ball when it was in your court

("Did you even hear what I said?")

I knew you dropped some of our friends.

For some new ones you liked better,

A hint or two from time to time

("You never take me anywhere?")

I knew you dropped off the kids.

At your mom's or my mom's to run errands,

Your sight, your eyes from me

("Pay attention to me!" {your silence bellowed})

But with all that dropping,

All I could feel

Was when you dropped my heart.

Some blog readers ask me where I get my pictures. Others ask me about my topics.

My ideas, where do they come from; where do they go. Well, pictures come from a variety of sources from Google images to EBay, with an occasional scan. Ideas, well, that's hard to say. From recesses, from coves, from little streams of my mind. Where do they go? Who knows? Today's entry was based on a picture I saw and liked. I thought a poem in store. It's about no one I ever knew, yet it's about a generic bunch of people I've observed. It's just a voice and nothing else.

Other days, I sit and want to write about a topic and have no picture. I've spent as much as an hour or more on-line trying to find just the right picture. Sometimes with no success, thus, no entry. See what you might have missed out on? Had I only found the picture.

SNOW CONES AND SLUSHES

Sickly sweet juice. Shaved iced. Drippy. Shirt stained. No wonder people of all ages love snow cones.

I love the feeling of gulping too much ice to allow your throat to swallow. So there the lump sits. Agonizingly slow to go down the gullet. The DQ had the frozen slushes before the Blizzards, and a friend of mine in high school, David Atkinson and I used to drink them as fast as we could to get headaches. We probably never did it more than a couple of times, but it's there in my memory bank.

David was younger than I, but one of those guys who could get me to do stuff that I shouldn't have done. There seemed to be a lot of younger friends and, yes, those my age, and yes, those older ones, too that could also get me to do things that I knew better than.

Homestead was a small, old 9-hole course in town near where David lived. Armed with a bottle opener and a package of straws, we walked onto the course late one weekend night and opened the cooler. We popped the caps off grape, orange, root beer, cokes, squirt and drank some from each. The cooler was horizonal rather than vertical which allowed us to take our time drinking in the sweet juice, rather than getting rush from a vertical cooler with bottles facing parallel. A later generation would call our concoction of various drinks suicides. We just thought we were pranking and getting away with something only we/he thought up. I'm glad we only did it once.

I'm sure there were a lot more things that we could have done to cause us to get into more trouble. I'm just glad neither of us was any more creative.

I don't have much of a yen or hankering for a bunch of different sodas or even slushes. But a good old Blue Eagle snow cone from the Snow Cone Lady in Summersville would hit the spot about now.

REMEMBER WHEN MIA WAS BEAUTIFUL?

Mia Farrow took this photo in Chad. It made me think of 3 things.

Black is beautiful. Always has been. Well, maybe not always, especially when I see some of the hip hop styles that some dress in. But I'm rabbit trailing. But Black, Brown, Red(?) I really don't see how Native Americans were Red; Yellow(?) same with Orientals. Whatever color, if Jesus can love them as the song says, then why can't I? And they are beautiful. But I remember when the saying "Black is Beautiful" was popular. It came at a time in our country's history when Blacks did not feel especially beautiful. At least on the national stage. It was uplifting to them, as it revealed a truth.

The second thing the picture made me think of was remembering when Mia Farrow was beautiful. As Allison Mackenzie on "Peyton Place", she had a refreshing, beautiful, healthy look about her. Long, clean well kept hair she was very attractive. Then she chopped her hair as if to run from her beauty. She seemed to hang out with Woody Allen and others who changed her for the worst. "Rosemary's Baby" did nothing for her and she faded, literally.

The third thing I thought about was spawned by my morning walk/jog. My jogging days are behind me, but during every walk I include a short jog, just for old times sake, I guess. I saw a friend I hadn't seen in a year or two. Quite old, quite wrinkly, she has had 7 operations on her face for skin cancer. But she's so kind. She is beautiful. Isn't it about time, with all the baby boomers growing older and older despite our efforts to maintain, that someone started a campaign?

Ok, I'll do it. Let's start with a slogan. Let's borrow from the past. I have it: "Old is beautiful (Just don't look too closely)".