There is nothing like a real Joint

25. January 2011 · 5 comments · Categories: Baltimore, daily life, family, food, good things, home, nostalgia · Tags: ,

No not the kind you smoke, the kind you eat at.  A dive, a hole in the wall, a place that is not quite clean, but hasn’t been shut down by the health department.  Yeah, that kind of Joint.

There are a lot of Joints in the Baltimore area.  Duda’s in Fells Point, Davis Pub in Annapolis, and my personal favorite Attman’s Deli on Lombard Street.  Recently, I had the opportunity to take some friends to Attmans and share a real Baltimore experience with them.

I’ve been going to Attmans since I was knee high to a grasshopper.  There are only two things on the menu that I’ve ever ordered — hot dogs and corned beef on rye with mustard.  That’s it, why try anything else, when these two items are perfection?  (Oh, there are about 200 options on the menu for those who don’t like my choice.)

The kibbitz room is basically the same as it was when I was a boy.  Not quite clean, but not dirty, and walls filled with picture frames.  Although, some of the more — ahem — questionable material is no longer on the walls.  Somehow it feels like coming home every time I go in.

And that is the definition of a Joint — a place that is unpretentious where you feel like you’re at home.

 

One more poem from the vault

25. August 2010 · 2 comments · Categories: creativity, culture, daily life, disgust, entertainment, frowns, frustration, lunacy, music, noise, nostalgia, poems, rants

Back in college, there was a popular class called “Arts 15: Introduction to the popular performing arts” — otherwise known as the history of rock and roll.  The professor was, shall we say, opinionated.  One test question that is still stuck in my craw follows:

The greatest rock and roll band of all time was:

  1. The Who
  2. The Beatles
  3. The Rolling Stones
  4. Queen

More »

Found: Old Poems

05. August 2010 · 2 comments · Categories: daily life, fear, friends, good things, home, nostalgia, poems, self, smiles, thoughts, time, writing

Nearly a year ago I wrote about Lost Talents.  I wrote about poems that I had written in college.  Shortly after that post, my good friend sent me scans of many (but not all) of those poems.  I was blessed, but many of them were incomplete drafts. I started hunting on old hard drives at that point.  This week, another friend booted up an old server “alpha.tincanalley.com” which had my home directory from 2004.  And that was a goldmine I found a directory called “files” which had all my poems from college and some other interesting things as well.

Here is a poem I wrote over the course of many weeks in 1992.  I’ll be posting several over the next couple of weeks.   I wrote this for a woman who I’ve known since fourth grade.  We’ve largely lost touch, but I think of her every time I see a horse farm.

A Letter to Laura

Remember that Friday night,

In August of nineteen-ninety?

The air was cool and unseasonable,

More like autumn.

I had stopped to see you

The last time before leaving

For college the next day.

The fields around your house

Seemed secluded; but they weren’t.

The first stars appeared

In the eastern sky, while the sun

Dropped below the Blue Ridge range.

Our summer ended,

And lives began once again in mystery.

As the blue-black night settled around us,

The light in the garage

Cast our shadows

On all those little rocks,

In the driveway.

We didn’t have time to spare,

No reminiscing, philosophizing,

Or long goodbye’s that night.

Inside, your family waited;

Packing for the day.

I had to get home myself,

But could not leave you.

I hoped that something more

Than a simple goodbye

Might bring us together that night.

I looked into your eyes as I often had,

Not knowing what to expect.

You smiled, but a tear still formed

In the corner of your eye.

You whispered some phrase

That only God knows now.

But your tight, forced smile

Would not allow fear or sadness,

We had to be strong, again.

Like the sister I never had,

You held me tightly.

And in that moment,

I saw the sparks of an old romance

That never caught fire,

Flicker and fade.

You said leaving was hard

And it was damned hard

As I walked slowly to the car

And began the drive down

The gravel into the dark, night.

The Lance Lookback

27. March 2010 · 2 comments · Categories: cycling, daily life, family, fatherhood, gear, good things, mr. grey, nostalgia, penn state, sidetracks, smiles

I went for my first ride on my new bike today despite the fact that it was still a bit on the chilly side.  Loaded up on layers and hit the road at about 12:45.  I got in a good 1.5 hours on the bike – enough to stretch out all my cables and need to get some adjustments done – and clocked about 16 miles.  This was not only the first ride on the bike, but the first ride of my season.  I may have overdone it, but it was really hard to stop.  For the first time since I started riding again two years ago, I did not get passed by anyone on the trail – this may have had to do with the fact that there weren’t a lot of people out there, but I’m gonna count this as a Win anyway.

I had no virtually no discomfort on the bike and did not suffer from numbness in my hands and feet like I normally do on my mountain bike.  This is awesome!

During the ride I had a lot of time to think, which is part of why I ride.  I had two things pop into my head as I was riding.  The first was the memory of riding with one of my D-phi brothers Dano back in 1992/93.  Dano was into road bikes and I was into mountain bikes.  He had a sweet Cannondale and I had a clunky steel Schwinn road bike that didn’t even fit me really.  I remembered Dano kicking my ass on hills.  I wonder how I’d stack up with him these days.

The second was a vision of the future.  A friend at work was telling me the story of one of his friends who was recently out for a ride with his son who at some point, gave him “the Lance Lookback” and bolted on like lightening.  I had a vision of Mr. Grey doing that to me sometime in down the road and well, I can’t wait for that to happen.  It’s gonna be pretty damn rad.

Snow Days: Another Legacy Concept

03. February 2010 · Write a comment · Categories: america, Baltimore, daily life, facebook, incongruities, information, internet, lunacy, media, noise, nostalgia, snow, technology, twitter, weather

Most days, I’m firmly in the camp of people who believe that technology makes our lives better.  We have access to information in unprecedented ways in human history.  And make now doubt about it, information is powerful.  It can enrich our lives.  In some cases it saves lives.  Sometimes, I wonder though, whether we are living richer lives in this age of technology.

I really do count myself lucky to live in the age of information, partly because I can remember when information did not flow as freely as it does today.  When I was young, we lived in a small town in the country.  It was easily 12 miles to the nearest town and 15 to a town with a movie theater.  Our town was so small that we didn’t have a local newspaper, there was one that was geared toward the whole county, but not a local paper.  We got most of our news from Baltimore, either in The Evening Sun or on WJZ 13 news.  We had two black and white television sets.  One had a 13 inch screen and one had a 19 inch screen.

If I wanted to learn about something, I went to the library and scoured an archaic set of drawers called a card catalog.  Then I would locate the book on a shelf by the reading a set of codes on the spines of the book which helped me to find that single book in a room full of shelves.  Then I would take the book to a counter, and the librarian would stamp a due date in a card that was kept in a pocket pasted to the inside back cover of the book.

If this sounds like something out of the 1950s, well, it is, but this was also my experience in the early 1980s.  We got a color TV when they laid cable in our neighborhood, in 1986.  When I was in college I did not have an email address.  I graduated in 1994. More »

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