Baseball player and steroid user Sammy Sosa appears to now be hiding from his crimes against the game by changing his Race. The dark-skinned Sosa is now the bright white Sammy. Say it ain’t so, Sammy, say it ain’t so:
As we age, and as we realize there are more days behind us than ahead of us, it becomes necessary to pay more attention to the wild terms of living a dangerous life. The change of season from Winter to Spring is a harbinger of renewal — and you cannot have new beginnings without the onslaught of death. Watch for the harbinger. Weigh the harbinger. Fight the harbinger.
I am pleased to announce my paper, Creating Aristotelian Irrevocable Change in Tourists Touching Down at Newark Liberty International Airport, has been accepted as a part of “Tourism & Performance: Scripts, Stages and Stories” series for the 2005 Tourism Cultural Exchange Conference held at the Sheffield Hallam University School of Sport and Leisure Management, United Kingdom, 14-18 July 2005.
My paper argues every move a tourist makes through the airport is actually orchestrated and directed in an aesthetic way using Aristotle’s theory of dramatic construction: Plot, Character, Thought, Diction, Music and Spectacle.
by Darlene Psota
(About the Author: After leaving the Cheese Factory, Vic King was employed by the North Loup Lumber Yard, where he worked until his retirement 20 years later. He continues to live in his home on the west edge of town. He celebrated his 90th birthday in September, 2004 with an Open House honoring his contribution to the community. Darlene, his youngest daughter, helped Vic compile his memoirs and submitted them to Go Inside in his honor. She lives in Shenandoah, Iowa but continues to visit her Dad on a regular basis.)
I suppose most travelers driving through North Loup, Nebraska would see only a small town, just one of many that dot the roadways of rural America. But for me, driving down Highway 11 and seeing the water tower come into view, the years drop away and the spell that is North Loup is cast once more.
In my mind’s eye, I see more than just a small town. I see people with hopes and dreams. I see homes and businesses that have withstood time. I see a proud past and a bright future. I see love and faith and integrity.
I see these things because, no matter where I am physically, North Loup was, and always will be, my home. No matter how often I return, every time I turn into my Dad’s driveway and see him standing at the kitchen door watching for me, I am filled with a joy and peace that comes from a heart filled with precious childhood memories.
We live in disposable times. Our lives are wispy and temporary. I suppose this has always been true, but in the present Age of Momentary Relationships and Passing Glances, I consider myself blessed that I was able to live the first 23 years of my life in the same house. Because of that rock-solid start in a community, I have an indelible sense of home and of belonging and of being a valued and of being a rooted member in the city of Lincoln, Nebraska.
Movin’ On Up
After living in the same house Lincoln for 23 years, life changed. I moved to Washington, D.C. and I lived in two different apartments in no less than eight months. I then moved to New York City and I lived in one apartment for 60 days and then four other apartments over the last ten years. It’s a difficult task to move the essence of your life into cardboard boxes, deciding, after each move into new digs, what you want to keep and what you don’t mind throwing away and losing forever to the trash heap of former experiences.
This redaction of our lives into “save” and “don’t save” piles gives the body of who we are less volume with each move — our experience has been paged through and edited down to the basic nuts and bolts of mere survival.
Murky Bottom Memories
Memory and experience are the only threads back to our past, the physical touchstones have been pitched upon the lakes of our rippling lives and they’ve sunk to the murky bottom never to be retrieved or held again.
There’s a sliding scale of importance that is always prevalent when deciding what to take with you. Something you throw away now that you kept the last time you moved is a large mark defining who you are and where you came from: It is yet another ring in the tree of your life, for once this object had meaning and now it has none except as a breadcrumb of where you at a moment in time.
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