Childhood Memories of Buying a Christmas Tree

This is a revised version of a story that appeared in the Virginia Beach Sun on December 1, 1988.     

      Men measures their progression through time in many ways. As young boys, we cut our neighbors grass and as adolescents, we deliver their newspapers. As adults, we bring them their mail and sell them their cars and as old men we exaggerate how well we accomplished all of these tasks.

      For me, the one sure measure of time and my own journey through it has been the Christmas tree—or more precisely, how I have gone about getting one each year.

      I remember as a child, in Rochester, how my father and I would walk up the street to the City Service gas station where the man would have all his trees leaning on one side of the building. They would be stacked up in a giant heap making it impossible to compare them but nevertheless my father would hold up one after another, and ask my opinion.

     “What do you think of this one?”

  “How do you like this one?”

  “How about this one?”

  “Do you like this one?”

  Until finally he found one that he liked.

  “This one looks pretty good. I think we’ll get it.” My father would then pay the man what I suppose was a couple of bucks and then we would carry it back home. Not even the freezing cold could dampen my excitement.

Restless Kids and Rainy Days

This is a rewrite of an article that 
appeared in The Virginia Beach Sun, August 24, 1988.


I think sometimes the biggest overriding factor in raising kids might just be luck.

As the former governor of Maine, James B. Langley’s mother told him at his graduation, “Despite all the honors, there is one circumstance more than any other that will determine the turnout at your funeral. And that will be the weather.

That was luck Mrs. Langley was talking about.

Take summer vacations—please!

Our kids, Jessica, eight; Danielle, six; and Dylan, four were all at the age where they were pretty much confined to the house, the yard and the immediate neighborhood. Kathy and I knew that we would have to have some kind of a plan going into the summer.

Hand-in-Hand

A similar version of this post was originally published under the title, Memories of hand-in-hand images, in October 1988 in the Virginia Beach Sun.


There is this elderly couple that I would occasionally observe walking through the lobby of a building where I delivered mail. I remember them stepping out of the elevator, arms locked together, and taking short, shuffling steps to where I would be distributing the mail. Neither of them walked with the greatest of ease, and one could easily and humorously speculate as to who was helping whom.

There are not many details to my recollection of this couple other than that short shuffle that I would sometimes observe. But I thought about them the other night a while back at—of all places—a skating rink where kids, mostly teenagers, were whizzing around just as smooth and as graceful as most people only dream about.