Reunion Redux

An old friend from high school I hadn't seen since uh, the late-'70s, was visiting NYC for the weekend, so we got together at a diner with 3 other high school friends and it was reunion time again! It's really nice how well we all get along after so many years without seeing each other.

But now I'm too tired to post much because I worked today and got home late after the dinner. And I'm stuffed, too. I just had a grilled cheese sandwich and some fries, but I think I still managed to eat too much.

Feeling: tired

~~~o0o~~~
Technorati Tags: friendship

Reunion

I blogged before about having reunions with friends from school. Today, one of them (W) and I met up with 2 other old friends we'd lost touch with (A and S). A and I had been friends since 2nd grade. We lived around the corner from each other. The last I saw her was at my wedding in 1985.

So there the 4 of us were in the diner pictured to the left, looking nearly the same now as way back then, catching up, having fun. After lunch, A had to stop in to visit her parents who still live in the house she grew up in, so the rest of us went along and it was amazing how much her mother remembered about us.

We plan to do this again. I hope so. It's nice when you find you can go back, and I think for me, it worked because I left behind any lingering emotional baggage from the past. By not having so much invested emotionally in success, I can enjoy it and the friendships for what they are and not put anything more on them than is there. It's about reconnecting and having fun. I can't find fault with that.


Feeling: happy

~~~o0o~~~
Technorati Tags: friendship

Flickr Meet-Up

I'd made plans today to meet up with a couple of flickr friends, one of whom I hadn't met before. She had come into NYC for the weekend, so it was a rare opportunity I didn't want to pass up due to this nagging colitis thing. Fortunately, I was feeling more energetic than I have in 3 weeks and we had loads of fun looking at holiday decorations and taking pics with our toys at Rockefeller Center.

Flickr might be a great site for storing and sharing photos, but it's also offered me a wonderful place to make friends online, where I start out sharing a hobby with people, and in the case of the toy photographers, which is one of my photography loves, we share a couple of hobbies: collecting toys and taking pictures. Not only have I made friends via flickr, but our toys have become fast friends, too. Here is my duckie and her Babo Uglydoll posing by the tree in Rockefeller Center.

Feeling: a bit better

~~~o0o~~~
Technorati Tags: friendship

Thoughts that Dropped Out of My Head

So, folks, it's time to start practicing defensive walking. It's like defensive driving, only with the car. We need to do this because, not only do a lot of pedestrians not pay attention to where they're going because they're busy talking on their cellphones, they're also texting. Yes, texting while crossing the street. It's my latest pet peeve. I saw this odd behavior twice today. A woman this morning, a man lunchtime. Neither seemed in any way aware or bothered that they were surrounded by people who had to dodge out of their way and that there were cars revving their engines in anticipation of the light turning green. Although the guy walking through the subway station on my way home while reading a newspaper wasn't much better.

I have managed to finally activate mobile blogging, as you may have noticed from my sparse test post. I will not be doing that while walking and especially not while crossing busy intersections.

Been playing on Facebook and reconnecting with some old school friends. A couple aren't online that we can find, so we'll have to resort to something a bit more old-fashioned: a letter. On paper. The mind boggles. Still, it's been fun and we hope we can work out an in-person reunion.

Feeling:

~~~o0o~~~
Technorati Tags: peeves

Flickr Friends

Yesterday, after work, I got together with a couple of flickr friends. One is someone I've known in person for a year, and the other was visiting NYC and we thought it would be nice to meet. All 3 of us enjoy taking pictures, especially of toys, and we really hit it off. It's really fun getting to meet people I know online.


Feeling:

~~~o0o~~~
Technorati Tags: friends

The Man from UNCLE

The Man From UNCLE will probably always be my favorite TV show, not for itself, but for what it did for me. I was 11 when it first aired and went through puberty with it. I formed an emotional attachment to the show and Illya Kuryakin/David McCallum (I adored David McCallum and didn't appreciate Robert Vaughn who played Napoleon Solo until I was much older) and still get a thrill when I see McCallum in something. I saw him in three not very good plays here in NYC specifically because he was in the cast. I got his autograph after one of them.

And the show got me started writing fiction — fan fiction, more than a decade before I ever heard the term — because it was cancelled and I wanted more adventures. And I wrote fan stories for other shows, too. My best friend in junior and senior high and I became friends because we both loved Man From UNCLE (MFU) and The Monkees.

I bought the books, and spent a few bucks tracking down the last 3 (fairly rare next to the earlier ones because fewer were printed). I bought the digest-size magazines that featured a MFU story every issue. I was an UNCLE junkie and I still have the books and mags. The lunchbox, with intact thermos, came after the show was off the air for a number of years. I'd never gotten media tie-in lunchboxes when I was a kid. But when I saw the set at a Creation (science fiction and comic books) fan convention in the late-'70s for a reasonable price (meaning, I had enough cash left to buy it), I had to have it.

I did buy a crudely-built, homemade "pen communicator" at a con and played with it endlessly. It was the show I missed more than any other (tho now there are many others I miss as much or more), cancelled as part of the backlash against TV shows in the mid-to-late-'60s. By then, after 3 1/2 seasons on the air, Napoleon and Illya became iconic characters and it didn't matter that Illya's name was misspelled (it should've had one L only).

In 1980, I discovered my then-best friend had also grown up a MFU fan. She said she'd read MFU stories if I wrote them. At that point, I hadn't written fiction for nearly 10 years, but with the promise of an audience, albeit of one, I took the bait and wrote five. She read and liked them and when she found out about fanzines, she gave me the info, I got the stories published, and was soon doing my own zines. I really believe that if it weren't for that, I wouldn't be writing original fiction now and I wouldn't be finishing the draft of my first novel (not a spy story, as one might expect, but science fiction tho with an element of suspense).

And I met my best friend of the past nearly 20 years because she wrote me a letter of comment (LoC) after reading my MFU fan fic stories. We became fast friends and collaborators and go to fan conventions together to this day.

So I can honestly say that The Man From UNCLE had a positive and longlasting effect on my life. And how many folks can say that about a TV show.

Feeling:

man from uncle

Pen Pals

When I was growing up, I wanted a penpal. They sounded so cool. I loved getting mail — still do — and with a penpal, I would be guaranteed a letter from somewhere in the world at least once every few weeks.

In 9th grade, I met W. We sat next to each other in home room and became friends because we both loved The Man From UNCLE and The Monkees. Our love for The Monkees worked out nicely, because she was enamored of Peter Tork and I was in youthful lust with Mickey Dolenz, so there was no competition, unlike UNCLE where we both adored David McCallum. And I soon learned, W had that magic entity: a penpal.

Her penpal was in Japan and a couple years older than we were because she had to get a penpal who was old enough to have studied English. I don't know where she'd found her penpal. I didn't know where anyone found penpals at that point in my life, back before the internet brought the worold into our dens and living rooms and offices and bedrooms, which was why I didn't have one of my own. So I asked W if she could ask her penpal if she had a friend who wanted an American penpal. And that's how I came to start a correspondence with Keiko, who was 16 to my 14, a relationship that lasted nearly 4 years (but I'm not really sure how long because it was a long time ago and I didn't save her letters). I still remember Keiko's full name and address. She lived in Osaka and her address had such a pretty rhythm that it became imbedded in my brain synapses for all time.

It was fun getting her meticulously written letters on thin paper so fragile I handled them carefully so they wouldn't tear. My father explained that the cost of postage to send mail overseas was so high that people in other countries usually used thin paper to keep the weight, and therefore the cost of mailing, down. I wrote back on stationery I bought for the occasion. In a pinch, I used looseleaf paper. We even exchanged photos and the two she sent me of herself, a couple of years apart, are still in one of my photo albums.

The best part was exchanging culture via gifts. We clearly had different interests and needs. I asked for anything Japanese, things I wouldn't readily find in the United States. She asked for teen magazines, specifically ones that had articles on the Beatles, but other pop stars in music and TV were fine, too. I bought extra copies of 16 Magazine, which I also got for myself, and issues of Tiger Beat, which I didn't read, myself, sending them to her as if they were care packages. She sent me a pair of handpainted, carved wood dolls, pictured here, a set of pressed flower bookmarks that I still have somewhere, and a pack of postcards from her ski trip up in Japan's mountains. I think I got the better part of the deal. I still have my early taste of Japanese culture and I'm sure those magazines, printed on cheap newsprint, are long gone from her collection.

I wonder, especially if she has no reminders, unless she saved my photo, if she remembers her American penpal. I sure remember her. And I wonder sometimes, what happened to her. What she did with her life. If she's still alive and well. We lost touch when she graduated school and moved on to more adult pursuits, but she'll always be in my memories, a pleasant part of my teen years.

Feeling:

penpals

Nostalgia Tour

Another one from last June.

My best friend in junior and senior high and I lost touch after college and a couple of years ago, 25 years since we'd last talked, she emailed me. Ah, the wonders of the internet, and Google. We had a reunion, in a diner not far from where I'm living now and spent hours catching up. We've been in touch via email since. Today, she drove down from CT and we took a nostalgia tour, to the elementary schools we each attended, to our junior and senior high schools, and to our former homes. And it's got me in a nostalgic mood.

Howard Beach is in south Queens, NY, on Jamaica Bay, not too far west of JFK International Airport. It was Idelwild Airport back then, when were growing up. I just finished looking around the official HB site's message boards and have been reminded of a lot of things. Unfortunately, I didn't recognize any of the names of folks posting. But the photos in the history section, showing the swamp and beach land where now there are houses and businesses, gives a good feel for how much this neighborhood has changed. I guess I lived there in its transition period. Built up but no big chains, except for the White Castle that's still over by the high school.

My old neighborhood looks so different now. New Park Pizza is still there, but the Cross Bay Lanes bowling alley is gone. Waldbaum's supermarket moved across the boulevard and everything's been built up so much on Cross Bay Blvd that I don't recognize it, anymore, and I can't tell where anything used to be.

There was the Big BowWow food place where we went with our mothers after each school year to celebrate a good report card. There was the small kiddie amusement park, Ditillio's, owned by my first grade teacher and her husband. There was Heller's Drugstore where I bought my Spalding balls and other necessities of childhood. There was the ditch at the corner where we used to go sledding until they filled it in in the mid-'60s and put up 4 houses. I remember when they put in the sewers (it was septic tanks til then) in '64 or '65. I remember a house we were all convinced was haunted and the little terror of a Chihuahua that lived next to the grade school and terrorized me for years whenever I walked past. There was the old HB movie theater that showed serials, travelogues, and short subjects before they got to the movies and they had raffles, too. I saw "Psycho" and "Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte" there, and many other wonderufl movies. There was the old Howard Beach Jewish Center in an old house with a veranda and more memories than I can name.

The photos, from the top: Entrances to my elementary school. Third photo is the rear of the school where the playground was and where we entered.

Next is the house I grew up in. I lived there from 1958-1969 (age 5-16). There was no deck. There were 3 short trees (more like large bushes) under the window, instead. The windows have been changed and the doors are different now, too. The brick walk used to be plain old concrete. We played stoopball against those brick steps. That white fence is new. We had a chain link fence and gate along the side.

The junior high we went to is next. It was a fairly new school back then. And below that is the high school. I don't recall the lawn looking that nice

Feeling:

hometowns

I Must Be Doing Something Right

Shoebox Greeting card I received in the mail:

Black and white photo of two women sitting on a sofa.
1st says: "He didn't!"
2nd says: "Oh, yes, he did."
1st: "Well clearly he was wrong."
2nd: "That's what I told him."

Inside card:
"You're more than a friend to me.
You're like a psychotherapist who takes sides.
Happy Valentine's Day."

Actually, I got two of the above card. The first was from my best friend, J, not just for Valentine's Day, but in commemoration of 20 years of friendship this month. The second was from my second best friend and writing collaborator, D.

I got a deja vu chill when I opened the second one a few days after the first. The old "Where did I see this before?" moment. Then I saw the first on my desk. duh

Thanks, J and D. You guys are the best, and you obviously think alike. I know I agree with you. heh