And then I wrote...

by Dick Schilling, "Editor Emeritus"

... that the late Ogden Nash, one of my favorite authors, wrote something which I often recall when 1 try to remember something from last month, last year, last century, whatever. The wording probably isn’t exact, but it goes something like: How confusing is memory’s lamp. One day a bachelor, and the next a gramp.

When the first recent warm day appeared, I opened my front porch jokingly called a three seasons porch, but really barely a two seasons porch most years. That’s one of the reasons it serves mostly as a book storage area these days. As I did so, I seemed to think it was a bit late this year, but a check of my food (and selected other things) diary showed it wasn’t until the Memorial Day weekend last year.

A kind and generous neighbor tilled my tiny garden patch, and then it started to rain almost every day, and there was even white frost one morning. So, when I finally was able to put in the tomato and pepper plants, I figured it was a late start. But again, that same diary told me it was two days earlier than last year!
But I do think I remember correctly that in my working years, when we had two much larger garden plots, and I worked 50 to 55 hour weeks, I used the long Memorial Day weekend to plant most of those gardens.

Warm days and warmer nights mean sleeping with a bedroom window open, and that’s the good news. The bad news is that those @#&*% birds wake up and start to vocalize at 4 a.m.! With a closed window, I didn’t notice. Now, I do. A raucous crow’s “caw” is an effective alarm clock.

My (for a little while longer, perhaps) Cubs appeared on television stations where I could watch them several times recently. And, of course, probably because of that, were losing more often than they were winning, about two to one, after their great start. Have they folded early? Do we have to “wait until next year” again?

Before the days of social media, way back when major newspapers actually taught ethics, it was a rule that straight news stories were to be reported without bias, and opinions were reserved for the editorial and op-ed pages. But there were, and still are, ways around that to show bias. I noticed a daily had a ten-inch story and a multiple column colored pix of a protest gathering in the Peoples Republic of Iowa City recently. Ten people and a camera crew showed up ... in a city of 70,000 people including several thousand university students.

Worth that much coverage?

Guess who was on the side of the protesters without having to say so!