John’s Blog

Given that Memorial Day is set aside to remember those who gave their all in defending our country, I have a deep and abiding respect for it. But I broaden my definition, as do most, to extend to remembrance of loved ones who have gone before us.

I’d like to visit my parents’ graves, but given that they decided to be buried in Washington County Maine, I don’t often get to do that. So I most often, on Memorial Day, visit my grandparents’ graves in Buckland Massachusetts. Buckland is rather a rural community. I suspect there’s actually a town center, but where my grandparents are buried is just off of a little village common where one can find a little white New England church and a small community center.

I bring along my gardening trowel. There’s one large headstone that merely says “Griswold” in large Roman letters, but there are also smaller grave markers perhaps 9″ x 16″ or so with more detailed information. These markers appear to be sinking, but in reality the earth naturally gets deeper as the vegetation grows, and eventually these markers will be swallowed, as it were, by the passage of time. I do my best to clear them up a bit with my trowel while I’m there, which is why I bring it along now. It’s easier on my hands.

After my duties, I kicked off my Birkenstocks and walked about barefoot in the cool grass, reflecting some, but mostly just moseying about (or nosing around - you call it) looking for interesting graves. There are a number of other Griswolds buried there, including my great-grandfather Eugene.

After just a few minutes of “reflection”, another car drove up to the gate. I’d parked out on the street and walked the 100 feet or so. Two ladies older than I exited the car with a couple of trowels, a jug of water, and a couple of geraniums. The, too, were out to visit their grandparents’, and parents’, graves, and plant some geraniums for them. I hurried to get my sandals back on, lest I be thought disrespectful of the dead.

Those that know me well have noticed that I’ve “come out of my shell” a bit over the past decade, and I’ll actually talk to people now. I greeted these ladies, and was going to offer my assistance, but they seemed to have two flowerpots well under control. I lamely commented on the weather or something, and stated my purpose for being there, pointing to my grandfather’s large headstone.

“Griswold?”, one of them said. “Well, Gene Griswold built our house”, referring, unknowingly, to my great-grandfather. I explained how that’d be Gene’s son I was there visiting. That started off a half-hour chat, them telling me that Gene was actually the crew leader, not the single-handed builder of their house (actually their father’s house, as they were children at the time). They complimented my great-grandfather’s abilities, and how since there was no electricity, everything had to be piece-cut by hand! Now that’s got to be an undertaking, building a whole house with a hammer and a handsaw…

I told them the one story I have of my great-grandfather - that I remember meeting him when I was “this high” (which wasn’t very high at all - Gene died when I was three). My grandfather lived in what I always considered a mansion in the next community over, and across the street was a tiny little house that my great-grandfather occupied when he wasn’t in Florida. I remember one day my father taking me to visit his grandfather. I haven’t been in that house in over fifty years, but I remember the kitchen entrance, and turning right into the sitting room, where my great-grandfather sat, I guess watching TV, and I remember shaking his hand. That’s it - my one story of Great Grandpa…

They didn’t recall my grandfather, but were likely a couple decades or so behind him in school, as they were talking about the late 30’s or early 40’s for the time of construction. But I accompanied them as they planted the geraniums, one between their parents’ headstones, and one between their grandparents’ headstones, and listened as they talked about their forebears.

They had also known my grandfather’s cousins Jane and Roberta (or Bobbie, as we all knew her), and how the girls had grown up in the Mary Lyons house. They concurred when I mentioned that they’d lived, up until eight or ten years ago, in the Major Joseph Griswold house in Buckland, perhaps a quarter mile away, until ill health forced them into assisted living. Jane, we surmised, was still alive, but they recalled (as I believe I do) that Bobbie passed away a few years ago.

We continued to chat as I walked them back to their car, thanked them for the nice conversation, and said I hoped to see them again next year.

Just got an email from Aunt Joann mentioning that tomorrow would have been Mom’s 80th birthday. We still miss you, Ed.

Wasn’t it Thomas Wolfe who penned “You Can’t Go Home Again”? I think so. That point was made clear this past weekend. We’d been out to my sister’s house for Easter, and rather than take a direct route (moi?) home, I decided to drive through my old home town. While much of it has retained its forlorn, dog-eared early-60’s patina, there have been notable changes.

For one thing, two of the schools I attended are no longer there! That’s rather shattering, even though they were old, old buildings when I attended fifth and seventh grades, respectively. One was a four-room school, the other eight. As time passed, these buildings, with their high ceilings and huge, light-inviting windows, became dinosaurs to heat in the winter, and there was (believe me!) no air conditioning. So I see why they went away. The four-room building where I attended fifth grade was replaced by two homes. In the early 70’s it had been converted into a youth center, where the miscreants of my day went to play a little pool, sneak a little beer (or pot), and wedge my mother’s Volkswagen Beetle between a couple of telephone poles conveniently spaced about a Volkswagen and three inches apart. (I had to execute a 27-point turn to get out of that bailiwick!).

One of the homes in which I grew up, just over hill from this school, was still there (I didn’t even look at the other this trip), but has been modified to no longer fit my recollection. In the forty-some years since we moved out of there, it’s no wonder. My parents had converted it from a two-family to a single prior to my memories - that’s why my brother had kitchen cabinets in his bedroom, and my sisters’ room had French doors…
The other school was gone altogether. I had just been reminiscing about that school with a reconnected friend of the era a few weeks earlier. She lived close enough to that school where she could, and did, walk home for lunch.

As we drove out of town, I took an even further indirect route through the south side of town into another adjacent village, and saw a lot of roads that I recognized, but a number that, for some reason, I’d never been on, or could recall. Thirty five or so years is a long distance to bridge.

You can’t go home again.

John A. Griswold, though I don’t think I ever heard anybody call him anything but “Jack” or “Dad”, would have been 82 years old today.

I, like most of the American public, am pissed off about the bonus fiasco at AIG. But it’s $165 million out of what, $170 billion that has been pushed into that quagmire of financial incompetence. One tenth of one percent! That’s equivalent to the cost of a newspaper in the weekly budget of a upper-middle-class home! (Oh, Harriet! Don’t tell me you bought another newspaper this week! Do you think I’m made out of money?)

Our illustrious elected officials in Washington have spent a week flailing their arms and tongues blathering about the outrageously inept actions of Tim Geithner in mismanaging this “scandal”, when, by all reports the $165 million in bonuses was in the bailout plan for AIG before it was approved by Congress. For those keeping score at home, this deal was approved by the same lot now excoriating Geithner. Why, then, is everybody, including President Obama, “shocked” to find out about it? Don’t they read the bills they are voting on? Don’t they at least have lackies to do their reading for them? They’re all standing there at the plate, watching the guy behind the left field dugout waving the big foam finger.

Meanwhile, what’s been happening with the other $164,835,000,000 that was pushed into AIG? Who knows? They’ve been watching the bonuses!

This comes a couple of weeks after writing “earmarks” into a $400 billion “stimulus” package until it became a $700 billion spending bill - that’s $700,000,000,000 - 4242 times the amount of the bonuses.

Change? Doesn’t sound like change to me.

The company I work for has an active “spam” filter on the incoming e-mail stream, and these e-mails are pushed off into a special bucket that can be reviewed - just in case one of the e-mails turns out to be legitimate. I don’t ordinarily bother to look, but here are some of the recent subjects that are supposed to lure me into opening the virus-infested crap:
We will have bicycle-tour!
Go downstairs now
Your IP saw on illegal sites
Admin asked you to add him
Let’s listen to this specialist
Is that your dog on a street
About our common friend Jack
Found your card in lift, it’s Mark
Please read
Fire near your house!
Jennifer, that girl, wants your number
I’m headhunter, let’s meet
Our lections scanned
Sandy will sue you
We meet stars tomorrow
I scanned all info..
E-version of documents
Your car is scratched
Hold party photos
We go to bowling
Inquiry form for mail service holders
Forgot my cell phone at home
Come to our room
Saw your wife today
Open it 1 hour later, ok?

And that was just today, though a lot of them are repeats from earlier in the week.

It’s been a week. “Barack Hussein Obama” - Not quite “Thomas Jefferson”, nor “Abraham Lincoln”, nor even “George Herbert Walker Bush”.  But I voted for him, thinking at the time that he was the lesser of the two evils. I was a strong supporter of John McCain going in, but as time went on, I felt less and less in tune with what his message was. And I was really high on him when Sarah Palin came on board as the VP candidate. But it quickly became apparent that Sarah was a huge liability, and that alone was enough to sway me to Obama. (I’d have been quite happy if the ticket were Biden/Obama instead, too).

And yes, I recognize the historic significance of finally getting a black man in the White House, but I don’t care that he’s black. Yes, it’s symbolic of the great strides “we” have made as a country (and it’s pretty damned significant that his primary competition for the candidacy was a woman!), and I appreciate that. But I don’t expect, and really would be disappointed, if it makes any difference that President Obama is black.

I expect President Obama to be presidential, to lead, and to catalyze our nation toward getting out of this hole we’ve managed to dig ourselves. I’m hoping that President Obama will bring to a close the “ME” generation, to instill a new ethic of responsibility instead of entitlement,  and create an ethic of “what can I do for you?” instead of “what can you do for me?”.

Good luck and Godspeed, Mr. President.

You know you’re from Western Mass if…

1. You don’t speak with a Boston accent, but you can spot a fake one a mile away.

2. You get upset when Worcester is referenced as being “west”.

3. You have never been to the new Basketball Hall of Fame, other than to go to the restaurants

4. You took at least one elementary school field trip to the Quadrangle or Symphony Hall.

5. You know all four seasons: almost winter, winter, still winter & road construction

6. You have used the heater and air conditioner in your car on the same day

7. You used to drive to packies New Hampshire on Sundays before they were allowed to open in MA

8. You know what a “packie” is.

9. You think everyone from Connecticut (and Longmeadow) is a snob and everyone from Vermont is a hippie.

10. You have enrolled in at least one class at Holyoke Community College.

11. You know at least three people that work for Baystate Health System.

12. You always call it Western Mass. (or WMass in writing), never Western Massachusetts.

13. You don’t really consider the Berkshires to be part of WMass.

14. You had Staties bust your high school keg party in Russell, Blandford, Granville or Otis.

15. You know what a Statie is.

16. You still call the local Fox affiliate, “Channel 61″.

17. You have never been to a Starbucks but you know the location of the nearest Dunkin Donuts no matter what city/town you’re in

18. You went to Bright Nights when it first started but haven’t been back since.

19. You don’t pronounce the “h” in Amherst

20. You know when somebody says UMass, they mean the one in Amherst and not Lowell, Dartmouth or Boston

21. You have tried nine different “shortcuts” to avoid the Coolidge Bridge traffic on Route 9.

22. You still call Six Flags “Riverside”

23. You still call the MassMutual Center “the Civic Center”

24. You drive 80 MPH on I-91 at all times; rain, shine, sleet or snow.

25. You consider anything that is more than 15 minutes and/or two towns away to be “far”.

26 . You have been to Connecticut’s state capital, Hartford, more than your own.

27. You say to yourself “It’s not that bad out” while driving through a Nor’easter.

28. You wish Mountain Park & Mt. Tom were still open

29. You have never been on a PVTA bus but when you’re in Boston, you ride the T because “it’s fun”.

30. You know where the largest St. Patrick’s Day parade in New England (and second largest in the country) takes place.

31. You have a love/hate relationship with downtown Springfield.

32. You leave at 7:00 AM on a Sunday to come back from vacationing on the Cape to beat the traffic at Exit 9 on the MassPike.

33. You will drive to the Yankee Candle flagship store in South Deerfield even though it’s 45 minutes out of your way and there are three other Yankee Candle stores that are closer to your house

34. You call Riverdale Street “Riverdale Road”

35. You “know someone” who will let you park for free on their property during the Big E.

36. You let your car idle for 20 minutes on a cold winter morning to defrost the windows instead of taking 20 seconds to scrape them.

37. You have bar-hopped at golf course clubhouses

38. You felt a sense of pride when Snoop Dogg wore a Springfield Indians jersey in the Gin & Juice video.

39. You have attended a function at Chez Josef

40. You know that Northampton is full of lesbians, Ludlow is full of Portuguese, Holyoke is full of Irish and Bondi’s Island is full of shit.

I recently had to replace a failing hard drive on a friend’s laptop. Yeah, I can hear the groans. The key word was “failing”, not “failed”. I bought a new hard drive from NewEgg, and (here comes the testimonial part) I bought a thing called DriveWire from an outfit called Apricorn. This DriveWire thing consisted of a small interface box with connectors on all sides, a power cable, and a USB cable. The new drive plugged into one side, and the power and USB into another. (The other two are more connectors for different drive types).

It came with a CD, and promises that the data transfer would cause no pain. I popped the CD into the drive, powered up the laptop, and the CD booted to Apricorm’s software. Basically, there was one button to push - “Copy drive A to drive B”. I pushed it. It started up, and a few hours later (OK, I don’t know how long - I went to bed) the copy was completed. I swapped drives, powered up, and the laptop booted. I defragged the drive without problem, and other than the laptop saying “Hey, I see a new hard drive”, there was no muss, no fuss, no pain at all.

Just like I like it! I think this was the best $35 I’ve ever spent.

I highly recommend the Apricorm DriveWire.

I also recommend NewEgg, but that’s another story.