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1. When I was a kid I noticed that old men talked to themselves. Lou Robinson would talk to his cow. Forrest Wall would sing. As a kid, I thought this strange. Now that I am closer to 80 than I am to 70 and hear myself talking out in the barn, I realize that what children hear is the very necessary articulated cogitation that keeps an old man from forgetting what he is doing.

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2. When Kassandra Hopkins out on Vinalhaven learned she had been awarded a $250,000 scholarship she said, “I think I screamed. People had to come into the office to see if anything was wrong.” It is a sad day when it might cost $250,000 to get through 10 years of any kind of US college. As I recall, 50 years ago tuition was something like $50 a semester and any rural kid could earn enough to get an education by working summers and after school and playing for dances Saturday night. Nowadays any poor kid determined enough to go to school in the US is in hock to the banks for the next ten or fifteen years. In recent years a college education has been discouraged by corporate America. An education does tend to create liberals. Nowadays, a lucrative career in the military is becoming a viable alternative for our high school graduates. It is becoming clear that the very last “entitlements” to be drained dry will be those of career military people. I can understand that Kassandra screamed. When I received a grant from the International Congress of Linguists to attend their 1967 Bucharest conference, I remember screaming and jumping about 3 feet off the ground. When I got to Romania and asked to be introduced to the other US delegates, I was told that there was only one delegate from each country. I asked Dr. Mohrmon why they picked me to represent Harvard, MIT, Stanford and Husson. She slowly looked me up and down and said, “Perhaps you were the only one who applied.” I advise young people to apply for every educational grant and scholarship that’s out there. If nothing else, it might keep them out of the army.

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3. In a letter to the editor about being arrested for drinking on the street, I read, “You don't need to drink beer to cool off, small seemingly petty crimes such as this contribute to a general attitude of lawlessness I am glad he was dealt with plus it led to discovery of an outstanding warrant. I have had several unpleasant encounters with public drunks put out a sign and invite them to drink outside your house if you would like, I've had enough of it.” Some of us who have been around long enough to see what a dedication to beer drinking can do --- the least of which is a huge gut and a premature need for medical attention which you and I pay for with rate increases in our health insurance--- would like to echo these sentiments.

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4. The email I got said, “Defy your age. Miracle Anti-Aging Cures Now Available.” To begin with, the word cure obviously implies that aging is a disease. And if aging is a disease, babies are born sick. These ads to sell pills to cure aging are written by young people who don’t realize that most of us who are old don’t mind being old. Got that, kids? We don’t mind being old. We don’t mind looking old. The only thing that annoys us is feeling old.

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5. We read in the paper that some church members are handing out sandwiches on the streets of Bangor. Having had some small experience with this free food at the church thing I should tell you that there is often a tremendous covert price to be paid for it and that the victim should be aware of this before digging in. By the time an unmarried man is 50, he has learned how to forage for food. If there is an old bach among your acquaintances you already know how gratefully he receives from you a simple peanut butter sandwich. It was while a member of that hapless brotherhood that I learned of a singles club in Camden that met in the cellar of a church across from Yorkie’s Restaurant. Although each member attending probably had his or her own agenda, I came to eat. It didn’t take me long to notice one eye-grabbing young woman who cleaned up the remains of the banquet by simply waving her hand over the table. Growling deep in my throat, I invited her to visit. The same day every dish was washed and replaced in scrubbed cupboards on store-bought shelf paper. That done, she got down on her hands and knees and scrubbed all the floors in the house. In the meantime, she convinced me to sort through overflowing cardboard boxes of newspaper columns that had commandeered my entire house for years. I made more trips to the dump that month than I had in the past 20 years. Sensing my delight with her need for order, she shifted her maneuvers onto fresh ground. After sweeping out the cellar she hosed down the walls and scrubbed the cellar floor. While resting each day, she did the wash and prepared tasty, nourishing meals. I almost cried for joy when she scraped and painted my house and glazed all the windows, which any Maine woman could do --- but not while weeding two acres of vegetables. When she butchered my two pigs and packed them in the freezer, my friends knew I was a goner. Although we’ve now been happily married for 20 years, don’t expect to see her on my arm when I’m out on the town. I just can’t bring myself to be seen in public with a woman who always has such red, chapped hands.

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6. For over a year too much of my social commentary has been inspired by letters in the Bangor Daily News Blog which, for reasons unknown to me, turns up as email in my computer every morning. For months I thought the majority of letters were written by 17-year-old high school dropouts who had nothing to do but sit at their computers in a drunken stupor. But I have come to realize that I am being exposed to the thinking of an entire sub-strata of Maine adults. More often than not, the letters on the page are so absurd that I laugh out loud, and because laughter is conducive to one’s vascular system, I will continue to read them and reflect when moved to do so. This came to mind when I read a unique item in a local newspaper that pushed that very same envelope of absurdity to the point of making me laugh out loud. Would you also laugh if you read that “The Thomaston Planning Board unanimously agreed Tuesday, July 19, that the Super Walmart proposed for Route I would create no ‘undue adverse impacts’ on the local economy, municipal services, or the environment”? My wife simply groaned.

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7. Does this sound like a good deal to you? Return an empty hp toner cartridge to a store in Rockland and you get $3 off on a purchase. This next deal is not so sweet, however. A few months later if you return an empty hp toner cartridge to a store in Rockland you get $2 off on a purchase. You see, they got you on the hook with $3 off and then hope you’ll continue to go along with them for only $2. Yeah, why not? Two dollars is better than nothing, but guess what happens next? You bring in the hp toner cartridges and they mail you a certificate of credit every month. If you don’t lose the paper you get in the mail --- and remember to bring it in before the expiration date --- you can put the $12 or whatever toward a box of pens the next time you’re in town. Then --- yes --- if you can believe this --- then, a few months later when you bring the hp toner cartridge to the store, you are told that they’ll email you your credits the next month. Ok, you can still go along with that, and you give them your email adderss. But --- then, every day, every day, every day you get an email from that store promoting something that you don’t care about. And for the first few weeks you continue to open each email, thinking, you see, that this might be the email that contains the credits that they’ve promised to send you every month. But if your cash credits are in one of those emails, who would ever know? Can you spend the rest of your life looking thought endless emails for a two dollar credit? Do you want to take lessons in how to bring down a store? --- How to aggravate your customers to the point where they wouldn’t push a button if doing so would keep you and your store from being blown away in a storm? You start by telling them that every hp toner cartridge they bring into the store is worth $3 towards a purchase.

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8. You have to be 18 or perhaps it’s 21 to buy beer in Maine. I don’t know which it is but I read a letter in the newspaper that said, “I've seen good stores with good employees failing to card people” How’s that again? Can an excellent store be defined as a store with excellent employees who never fail to card people?

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9. One of the cognoscenti who contribute to the newspaper blog I read daily informs us that "Irregardless" is NOT a word . . the correct term is "regardless". This is the kind of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put. I’ll continue to use irregardless irregardless, if you ain’t got no objections and will get back to you momentarily.

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10. Please listen to this. I just read this on a newspaper’s letters to the editor blog: “Thank God the Republicans got home from work; I've been trying to hold the fort against this liberal elitist mob. Welcome Betsy and God bless.” Isn’t there a bit of room for reflection in those words? Wouldn’t you question the commitment and sincerity of a Maine Republican who only mentions God twice in two sentences.

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11. We read that a young boy was shot in the neck by a teenager with a bb gun. An observer from another planet might think we were strange creatures: accidentally shoot someone in your home town and you are crazy and irresponsible. Go to someone else’s home town and shoot someone under the auspices of your government and you are a brave hero.

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12. My cousin Truman Hilt says that years ago you could go into a place and get a free sandwich if you could digest the proselytizing that went with it. He said that nowadays it is even worse: you can’t get at the wine and cheese at a gallery opening unless you’re willing to listen to a hippie playing folk music on a guitar.

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