After graduating from high school, my dad moved off to Columbus, Ohio, and started college. He lived under the Ohio State football stadium.
Ohio State’s stadium (ca. 1940), home to the Stadium Scholarship Program
As part of the Stadium Scholarship program, young men could live in the make-shift housing, do chores to help defray living costs, and afford a college education. The program still exists, even though the students no longer live under the stadium.
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When I was a little pre-reading kid, my parents read aloud to me, and some of those picture books were Little Golden Books. The only one I really remember well (and it’s somewhat because they saved that book) was A Day at the Playground, which I apparently called “Donny Donaldson,” after the book’s main character. The book was illustrated, as many of the Little Golden Books were, by Eloise Wilkin. And there was a standard sort of neighborhood depicted in those books.
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I’m trying to be a good Earth citizen.
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A couple of Wednesdays ago, I went back to West Avenue Elementary School to start Reading Club again. 
I have two of the girls from last year, but the third girl is going to a different school (say the other two girls). The school people said that I could choose the book for us to read this year, and showed me, in their library, all the books that they have “classroom sets” of. (In other words, multiple copies of the same book, so that students in an entire class can have their own copy to read.) I selected several books for the girls to choose from.
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There is an old joke whose punch line is “Kidney, man! Kidneys!” (And maybe I could have asked a dozen or so people and found out what the joke itself was, but just by typing in “kidneys, man, …,” Google instantly popped in the rest of the phrase and one click took me right to the joke.)
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I was at Wal-Mart last week, and I did something that would have shamed me in front of, maybe my mother, and most certainly my grandmothers, my great-grandmothers, and all the rest of the women and many of the men in my ancestry.
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I remember the first time I saw the movie Fiddler on the Roof. First, the oldest daughter goes to her father and says, no, she does not want to marry the butcher, which is an arranged marriage, as is the custom, the tradition. She would like his permission to marry the tailor, instead. Her father rants and raves, and at first refuses, reminding her about the tradition of marriages arranged by matchmakers and approved by parents. No, no she cannot. But, he thinks about how much the young couple love each other and how maybe it would be all right, and he relents, going against the long-standing customs and traditions of their Jewish community.
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A few years ago, Kevin and April bought an iRobot Roomba, a “vacuum cleaning robot.” After a while, they found 
themselves using it less and less and less. The configuration of their home made it difficult to use, so they offered it to me. Oh, yes, I wanted to try out the Roomba. And I love the Roomba. Most of the time. And I didn’t get rid of the regular vacuum cleaner; Roombas just do floors.
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Quite a few years ago, in articles in self-help magazines and books about changing your life and being more organized and getting things done, one recurring piece of advice about establishing new habits said that your could entrench new habits by doing the new habit activity for 21 days in a row.
If you do the things you want to institute as a habit (walking on the treadmill, eating a good breakfast every morning, going to bed at an appropriate hour to ensure you’ll get a good night’s sleep, etc.) for 21 days in a row, then you will have established a wonderful new habit in your life! That’s what the magazine articles said.
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The teen fashion department at Target is right in front of the door as I walk in. I enjoy seeing, at the change of seasons, what the new, trendy fashions and colors are. Some of the things I like; some of the things I don’t like at all. Some of the things wouldn’t have mattered how my teen-aged self felt about them; I would never ever have been allowed out of the house in them. I guess what goes around does come around, but some of it is coming around much shorter and skimpier than it used to be.
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