Little-known museum 

focused on electronics 

reopens in new home

Howard Griffin, sitting by the lunar camera he helped develop.

A geek-friendly museum that seems to fly under the radar held its grand reopening over the weekend in Baltimore County, a year after moving from its former home in Linthicum.

It's been around for four decades, and radar itself has always been a key part of the attraction for the National Electronics Museum. The brainchild of two employees of the former Westinghouse Defense and Electronic Systems Center, the nonprofit museum was created and operated with substantial support from the company that continued under eventual buyer Northrop Grumman. Many of the high-tech electronic devices on display were developed at Westinghouse.

Radar gizmos galore

Personally, I'm not much of a geek. But there was plenty that I found fascinating -- some of it seeming like grist for Jeopardy buffs. Like what does radar mean? (Answer: Radio Detection and Ranging).

The museum shares space with the nonprofit System Source Computer Museum created by System Source IT services company owner Bob Roswell at its Hunt Valley headquarters. His collection runs the gamut of computing devices from times well before the days of microchips... or any kind of chips, for that matter... and includes one of the first computers put together in the garage where corporate giant Apple was born.

It's hard to separate one museum from the other, as electronics and computers seem so intertwined. (There's also a video game museum housed in the building.)

In a back room during the opening, members of the museum-based Amateur Radio Club were busy on the airwaves operating its ham radio station (K3NEM) chatting with radio buffs across the planet and spreading word of the museum's reopening. A long work table was lined with vintage broadcasting and modern computer equipment now part of the station's operations. 

Ham radio operators at work.

My personal favorite part of the opening party was chatting with its most senior guest -- 90-year-old Howard Griffin, a Baltimorean who helped develop the Apollo 11 camera that beamed home to earth live television images of the first steps on the moon. One of several backup lunar cameras produced for the mission is displayed at the museum in a case alongside the special Emmy statuette awarded to Westinghouse for the technical achievement that enabled people across our planet to witness history. (Another backup lunar camera is displayed at the National Air and Space Museum.)

Howard, a Johns Hopkins-educated electrical engineer, said his role was in devising the thermal coating protecting the camera that was mounted on the lunar lander.

I asked about his view during the project of the likelihood the 1969 moon landing would entirely succeed -- especially setting down on the lunar surface, and the crew returning safety to earth.

"Very slim," he said.

The museum at 338 Clubhouse Road is operated by an executive director and volunteers, and for now open to visitors by appointment most Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Group tours also are available for scheduling. Admission is $15 for adults and $10 for students. And not a bad deal as a two-fer, since you get to see the computer museum on the same visit.

 

Post-election mysteries

Kamala Harris in Reno, Nev., a few days before the election. (Photo by Brycia James)

Questions for America
 that I cannot answer

Four years ago, in the weeks leading up to Election Day, my wife Bonnie Schupp was deeply worried. "I don't want Trump to be the last president in my lifetime," she told me.

 Election night was tense, the result too close for comfort -- and the accelerant for Donald Trump's "Big Lie" alleging rigging.

 We had for weeks watched Bill Maher's HBO show, "Real Time," in which the comedian/social critic repeatedly warned that Trump would not leave office willingly. Then, like prophecy, came the January 6 insurrection -- a riot and invasion of the Capitol which Bonnie and I watched, transfixed and horrified. 

I assured her that the attack would not change the result, that Joe Biden would be inaugurated as scheduled two weeks hence. Days before the inauguration, Bonnie found out she had aggressive pancreatic cancer. 

We watched the inauguration together. Though she knew her own time remaining was limited, Bonnie was relieved for the future of others and the nation she loved that Biden was president. She died two months later. 

Four years down the road, it is my turn to worry. No, I'm not on the edge of death. But I'm anfew months older than Trump. His health status (both physical and mental) has always been a mystery couched in vague assurances, but I've had some challenges of late. Like a brush with mortality just two months ago. And I had hopes, as Bonnie did, that Trump would not be the last president in my lifetime.

 Now it seems he might be, assuming Trump has four years without an intervention of fate and I don't. And I fear for the future of the nation that I love, but now have a harder time understanding.

 I've read numerous stories and heard TV pundits in the election aftermath assessing reasons for the failed Kamala Harris campaign. 

The economy? She offered proposals to help families and vowed to take on companies for price-gouging. Trump blamed her for not fixing the economy during her four years as vice president. Not that she had the power to fix the inflation of higher consumer prices, mostly the result of initial shortages during the pandemic and the simply relationship of supply and demand.

 He harped on America as a failing nation, claimed only he could fix it, and tariffs were the answer -- despite the warnings of experts that tariffs amount to a tax on consumers through higher prices and would fuel a new inflationary spiral. All this nonsense when unemployment was at a record low, wages higher, interest rates finally dropping and the stock market at a record high. America is hardly failing economically.

 Illegal immigration as an invasion of criminals was a constant theme, and inevitably the few recent cases of undocumented aliens linked to murders -- including one if Maryland -- served Trump's purposes for political exploitation. And even when the House and Senate had reached a bipartisan agreement on legislation to deal with uncontrolled border crossings, Trump got his legislative sycophants to kill it. He needed the issue to remain as uncontrolled as the border. 

Trump as the problem-solver? How many times has he been asked for his promised plan to "fix healthcare" to replace the Affordable Care Act? In four years as president, there was none -- only a Republican attempt to scuttle the ACA that was foiled by the late Sen. John McCain.

 Or for many voters, was it simply the fact that Trump's opponent was a woman of color? They were just looking for excuses to vote for him? 

More than a dozen former key aides in his presidency urged Americans to vote for Harris, saying Trump was a danger to the nation. A fascist, even. Others in his administration or took part in schemes to subvert the Constitution were convicted of crimes, imprisoned, disbarred. But Trump himself, the crime boss, despite his New York state conviction on fraud charges, will not lose a day of his freedom and doubtless as president will scuttle all federal cases against him.

 How could more than half of the participating electorate vote for him? I cannot fathom it. President-elect yet again, four years after his defeat by Biden, despite his innumerable faults and failures as a human being and from 2017 to 2021 in office. What voters chose to ignore, forgive or forget is astonishing, but inevitably offers a clue to their psyche.

 I am left to ask how anyone who lost a family member to Covid could ignore, forgive or forget Trump's lies and ignorance in his public response to the pandemic and undermining of public health science. More than a million Americans died. He at one point voiced the idea of people injecting bleach as a cure, among other preposterous suggestions, as he undermined the work of experts studying the virus and their push for wide acceptance of the quickly-developed vaccines to help contain it.

 I am left to ask how any military veteran could ignore, forgive or forget President Trump deriding the courage and sacrifice of the nation's defenders. among other insults. "Suckers and losers," he said in minimizing visits to the American cemeteries in France where many lost in World War II are buried. Or his stated suggestion of using the nation's military to deal with Americans exercising their free speech right of protest. (All this from an obvious draft dodger in the Vietnam war era whose alleged bone spurs must have been miraculously cured.)

My neighbor's lawn

 I am left to ask how any police officer could ignore, forgive or forget President Trump inciting the crowd he summoned to Washington for the Jan. 6 rally and failing to intervene as a mob's ensuing attack on the Capitol injured 140 police officers and contributed to the deaths of several. Close to a thousand people eventually were convicted on criminal charges related to the attack. Trump has called them patriots and vowed to pardon the many who are now serving prison terms. (In my own neighborhood in Pasadena, Maryland, a police officer who brings home his county patrol car after work flies a Trump "no more bullshit" flag outside his house and has a line of lawn signs adjacent to his driveway declaring he was voting for law and order, and for "felon and hillbilly.")

 I am left to ask how any good union member could ignore, forgive or forget Trump's blatant contempt for organized labor (and forget, by comparison, the incumbent Democratic president joining auto workers on their picket line during their strike in battling for a fair contract).

 I am left to ask how so many American voters could ignore, forgive or forget the incessant lies of Trump, his obvious lack of empathy for anyone other than himself and his family, his personal greed, his theft from charity, his con-man frauds, his racism and xenophobia, his abuse of women, and his crimes -- indicted by grand juries in multiple states, convicted in New York, and proving through millions spent on lawyers to delay justice that laws and the Constitution at the bedrock of America for more than two centuries do not apply to all.

 And I am left to wonder how those voters will perceive the results of their choice four years hence. I might not last that long, but suspect they will find themselves paying the piper. To say nothing of the likely global damage that may never be undone.

 

Nightside in the ER (photo by FL Ettlin)

A bloody story:

My big and scary (hemoglobin) adventure

Not to overstate the situation (keep in mind that I am back home, writing this), but my body has tried to kill me -- again. In 2019-2020 it was MRSA/sepsis, this time a more subtle attack in what appeared to be gradually diminished red blood cells.

More than a month of incessant headaches prompted a brain MRI a week ago... the results negative. Not even sawdust. Then things got weird. Dizziness, loud thumping sounds in my left ear in tandem with my pulse, blurry vision, an almost comedic spin and fall on Monday amid a cascade of bathroom cleaning products (no head impact), and then nearly flying backwards down the living room stairs on Tuesday morning.

Barely able to stand, I called my primary care doc,  and she told me to call 911. What ensued was two days at University of Maryland BWI Medical Center, where I arrived with a hemoglobin level of 4. (Normal for men is a range of 13 to 17.5, women slightly lower.)

Hemoglobin is a protein in red blood cells that whizzes oxygen throughout the body and to such innocuous places as my brain. I was nearly running on empty. When I moved, I could feel my heartbeat and the thumping speed up as my brain demanded more oxygen. The hospital hematologist told me of a patient she had with a level of 2, who had arrived still conscious and talking... but that case was a rarity.

I'm sharing my story because, from this experience, it might help folks pay closer attention to persistent headaches and worsening neurological symptoms -- but also in a wider view to offer a sense of the wonderful people whose daily work is saving lives, including (cue the dramatic background music) mine.

 The headaches behind my left eye and near the sinus cavity had seemed at first possibly from an infection, but 10 days of amoxicillin did nothing to help. I began to worry about the next most obvious act of hypochondria -- brain cancer! Thence my doc's order for the MRI, which took a week to schedule. Evidently they're very popular.

Friday MRI fashion selfie

The MRI  was last Friday. I was still quite functional. Went to the 210th birthday celebration of Baltimore's Peale Museum that Saturday afternoon, and a house concert Saturday night. On Sunday, the annoying thumping began.  I thought a neighbor might be doing some work, even drove around looking for its source. There was none. It was, so to speak, all in my very own head.

On Monday I took that spin onto the bathroom floor, reaching to the countertop for balance too late. Items there landed on the near side of the toilet as I spun around the bowl, knocking a line of cleaning product containers down like a row of dominoes and landing between the toilet and wall in a cascade of plastic... stunned but barely hurt. Just a bruise on the back of my left hand.

 I stood, tried to put objects back in their place, and used walls to steady myself in heading for the living room couch. I'd had lunch, but couldn't stand to fix dinner, and just headed to bed to sleep it off that evening.

Then came Tuesday morning. I awakened hungry, but dizzy. The thumping was incessant. As I turned from the hallway into the kitchen doorway, I sensed I was tilting backwards with the stairway behind me and grabbed the top railing for balance just in time to avoid a header crash landing.

My wonderful doc had messaged me on Monday that the MRI was negative and ordered other tests. Now I called her office with urgency, and within minutes she called back. I told her there was no way I could go anywhere for testing -- that I could barely stand. And she said to call for help.

I was hungry, though. The Lake Shore Volunteer Fire Co. is across a patch of woods less than a block away from my backyard, and just two blocks and barely one minute from the house by road. I was hungry, dammit. I worried about my blood-sugar levels. So I steadied myself to fix up a bowl of fruit, a slice of toast, and a quickee scrambled egg that I managed to overcook. I sat on the couch with my phone and food and dialed 911.

"I'm OK," I told the dispatcher. "The firehouse is just around the corner. They don't need to panic anyone with the siren." I didn't want to alarm the whole neighborhood. And I started eating to the sound of the ambulance siren ... a piercing wail that only seemed long enough for the crew to turn onto the main road from the firehouse driveway.

Two young men -- paid Anne Arundel County paramedics based at the volunteer station -- arrived and made a quick assessment. I told them they didn't have to carry in the cumbersome stretcher, just to keep me steady as I held the iron rail on the way down my nine curving front steps. (Was it stupid male pride, or emotions channeling the last time anyone was carried down the steps... the morning my wife died in 2021?) They lowered the stretcher by the curb, helped me recline, lifted me up and in, and off we went. The hospital is nine miles away, and I relaxed as best I could amid the thumping in my head.

I was checked in quickly, had blood taken and given an immediate CT scan. The ER was crowded, and I was conscious and lucid, so I was rolled in a wheelchair out to the waiting room -- requesting a spot as far as possible from the roughly 18 other people waiting for treatment room space. I sat there for close to 90 minutes of thumps, head down, trying not to think.

Hospitals are busy places these days, especially in emergency services. Beds for admitted patients were full. I spent the next approximately 22 hours in an ER treatment cubicle, on a narrow and uncomfortable bed never intended for lengthy stays. And over the course of the ensuing night, I was given a transfusion of two "units" of packed red blood cells and closely monitored by its caring team of nurses, physicians  and aides.

Not rock concert bracelets

My older daughter, FL, who is a nurse at another hospital, joined the party. She took a few pictures with her cell phone to record how pale I had become -- about as white as Casper the Friendly Ghost but not ready or able to float through walls.

Nearly at noon on Wednesday, patient escorts arrived simultaneously to take me to a cozy private room -- and to an MRI of my brain, head, neck and vascular system, in search of leaks that might account for blood loss or a carotid artery problem. The MRI escort got first dibs.

And I noticed something remarkable as I was wheeled on a gurney through the bright corridors: The thumping in my head had stopped. The transfusion had upped my hemoglobin level to 7.8, close to a targeted stabilizing measure of 8.

The MRI took 23 minutes. In case you've never experienced it, you are most often moved into a circular chamber... in my case, with my head padded snugly in place and earplugs to temper the sounds of this amazing machine: clangs, clicks, and -- what else? -- thumps.

 Twenty-three minutes of thumps, the last 22 of which featured an itch on my rose and chin that I could not touch. I focused on the sounds, counting sequences of the noises, with a woman's voice occasionally piped into the chamber that was as inaudible as a bad day in a crowded subway car.  I think it was offering updates on the timing for me, but could just have well have been saying, "Approaching Ritchie Highway Station," or "Next stop, BWI Medical Center."

I've told friends that I hope my sense of humor is the last function I lose. I did my best to be kind and funny to the hospital staff, even an aide who came by to check my blood sugar with totally no expression on her face. I gave her a hard time, sort of  -- elicting a tiny smile, maybe even a twinkle in her eyes, and as she departed wished her a great rest of her day.

I am in awe of hospitals. But I don't like being in them. I've had more than a few long stays over the course of my life -- longest among them a time in 1971 when I nearly bled to death from an intestinal rupture, and at this particular hospital for a week of body repairs after a nearly deadly head-on car crash in 1983, and the five weeks I stayed there between two visits for the life-threatening infection in the autumn of 2019 and February 2020.

Each situation was unique. Four of them featured ambulance rides. Through all of them, people who I mostly did not and likely will never know kept me among the living.

I am grateful to them way beyond these words.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My Christmas story

 

Oh, Christmas tree --

The author, 2023

 what a spell

 you cast on me

 For most of my life, I've had a love-hate relationship with Christmas trees. I even told about this a mere 16 years ago on a stage in front of an audience of hundreds of people, in a Baltimore show called Stoop Storytelling. The theme of the night: Holidays From Hell, Part Deux. 

 Blame it on my childhood. When I was growing up, my parents never had a Christmas tree.

 Well, maybe that's understandable. After all, we were Jewish.

 One year, my father took me across our street in Northwest Baltimore, to visit a neighbor family and see what Christmas looked like. It was the home of the Landsmans -- Ray and Dorothy, and more kids than I could quickly count.

 Ray was Baltimore's first Jewish police lieutenant, but Dorothy was Catholic and they came to an agreement that their children (about a dozen of them, all with names beginning with the letter 'J') would be raised in the Catholic faith. 

 They had a tree, presents in various stages of unwrap, the kids running around in seeming chaos, the smell of a ham in the oven wafting out from the kitchen, and Dorothy upstairs in bed nursing the youngest of their brood. The Madonna of Royce Avenue. Close to 70 years later, I still remember it.

 We celebrated Hanukkah, of course. But no, we didn't have the proverbial Hanukkah bush. I had a modest Lionel electric train set, with a small figure-eight track that wrapped around a leg of our rarely-used dining room table. My father Ben set up the train every year for the holiday season, and by New Year's Day it was gone back into storage.

 The Jewish dropout

 Religion was not all that important to me. I had a nasty teacher in Hebrew school -- and early in fourth grade I walked out of the class in anger and never went back. My parents got a call from the school two weeks later asking why I hadn't been attending. 

We had a difficult conversation in which I was threatened with punishment, but the crisis was resolved with a compromise of taking private lessons for my bar mitzvah. And at 13, after the synagogue ceremony through which a boy becomes a man, I became a religion dropout as well.

 At 19, in a courthouse ceremony, I married a girlfriend, Vol, who had been raised in a Christian family -- but like me, religion was not relevant to her life. But there was this little thing that carried forward: She/we had to have a Christmas tree. In our mid-20s we also had a daughter. And in one of my last pictures of us as a family, she and our 4-year-old Jennifer (who later changed her name to FL) are sitting by the tree with presents. 

A few months later, after a decade together, our marriage ended.

 And I got married again. My second wife, Kathleen, also had been raised as a Christian, and like the first she came hard-wired for Christmas. We even once attended the midnight Christmas Eve service at the nearby Lovely Lane -- known as the mother church of American Methodism. It was, in fact, lovely. 

As for our tree, she believed in buying good ornaments -- and for my young daughter, a top-quality stuffed animal lion she named Li-Li (pron: lie-lie) that saw her through some challenging times as she bounced between parents in Baltimore and Florida.

 Marriage number two lasted about four years, and when Kathleen departed I was left with ornaments including a small herd of beautiful silken carousel horses and elephants that had graced our trees.

 The third proves the charm

 And I got married again. Yup, third Christian for this lapsed Jew -- this one not only having had a strong religious upbringing, but playing the organ in church and at age 12 leading a cherub choir. 

Attending Frostburg state college in Western Maryland, she made a point of going to services at every church in town -- eventually becoming the lone white person in the only black church there. The minister. Joe Gipson, became a friend, and after services each Sunday she traveled with him about nine miles down the road to Cumberland for his services at a second black church. She was their pianist.

 And near her 1967 graduation, when Bonnie married the first time, Joe was the soloist singing at her Baltimore church wedding.

 When we embarked on a life together in 1980, in our mid-30s, a Unitarian minister who was a favorite customer in her camera store, Bill Barnett, officiated the wedding in the living room of her little house just south of the city. And six weeks later, the daughter we created together was born.

 We began attending Bill's Unitarian Universalist church in Annapolis, which I enjoyed whenever I managed to stay awake during services. We wanted our daughters to benefit from its ecumenical education program, which was free of dogma and included sex education. Its services drew on beliefs and traditions from multiple faiths, with Christmas seeming to have a far greater joy than Easter. The existence of Christ was pretty much acknowledged, but for some in the congregation not necessarily a resurrection.

 At home, of course, we had a Christmas tree. Fortunately, Bonnie took care of decorating it. I just didn't enjoy the task -- or, for that matter, having to buy a damn tree every year. At least Bonnie preferred trees that were a little bare of branches. Lush trees did not show off the ornaments as well. Not quite a sad Charlie Brown tree, but one that looked good with its bare spots in back facing a wall. And usually priced lower than the "good" trees.

 And our collection of ornaments began to grow. The horses and elephants from my days with Kathleen galloped and trumpeted beautifully in company with "Baby's First Christmas" ornaments from 1944 (Bonnie Jean) and 1980 (daughter Lauren), little mice, a rhino and a hippo, lace snowflakes, intricate balls crafted by a blind Frostburg college friend decades ago, a German shepherd harking (not barking) to our dog Miss T, favorite teacher ornaments given to Bonnie by middle school students during her career as an educator, a tiny baseball symbolic of the too-much-attention I gave to my favorite spectator sport.

 And now, a dark turn...

 In 1994, I had a great idea: Why do we have to buy a tree? Why don't we walk into the woods near our home in suburban Pasadena and get one the old-fashioned way. Bonnie reluctantly agreed to my plan. 

Daughter Lauren, then all of 14 years old, was invited to join us on that December night, and was not so keen about the idea.

 "You mean you're going steal a tree?" she said. "Why don't you just buy a tree?"

 "I think poach would be a better term," I replied.

 So it was just me and Bonnie heading out about 11 o'clock, under a full moon on a foggy and unseasonably warm winter night. It seemed incredibly romantic. I drove us in our station wagon the nearly quarter-mile to edge of the woods, and, carrying a saw, was leading the way on its path in my usual fashion -- to make sure any residual spider webs did not reach my bride. 

 A little more than a tenth of mile into the woods, the path takes a curve and as I stepped ahead of Bonnie, she encountered an unexpected obstacle. I heard a thud and a cry of pain, and turned to find she had slipped in a small patch of mud and was thrashing around on the ground.

 I reached to help her up, and saw the bone protruding from her left wrist. We managed to get her standing, and as she was shaking I held her right arm on the short walk back to the parking spot. I gallantly put my jacket on her seat -- well, actually, to keep the seat from getting muddy because Bonnie had mud just about everywhere.

Back home, I helped get her clean and in fresh clothing for our ride to a hospital about seven miles away.

 The orthopedic surgeon on duty assessed the injury, and told us, "I have good news, and bad news Which would you like first?"

 "How about bad news," I suggested.

 "This is one of the worst fractures I've seen. But the good news is that I can fix it."

 I breathed a sigh of relief that proved only temporary. 

 "But I have more bad news," he continued. "First I have to break it again to get it into the right position."

 Bonnie was given some joy juice -- an intravenous painkiller -- and I held her right hand as the doc gave a quick twist to her injured wrist. The cracking sound stays with me even now, nearly 30 years later.

 While Bonnie was recovering from anesthesia after the ensuing surgery, I was dispatched about 3 a.m. to a nearby all-night pharmacy to fill her prescription for a pain med she would need at home. The pharmacist looked at the prescription and asked, "Do you want the name brand or a generic?"

 "What's the difference?" I asked.

 "The generic is 10 dollars, and the name brand is 35."

 Okay. I admit it. I was too cheap to pay for a Christmas tree. But now, I was overwhelmed by guilt. It's like the yin and yang of my Jewish upbringing. What to do?!!

 "Give her the good stuff," I stammered.

 So the upshot is I spent $50 for the emergency room co-pay, $35 for Percocet pills, and didn't even have a tree to show for it. 

 The next day, as Bonnie recuperated at home, I drove two miles up the road to Ace Hardware and found most of the Christmas trees had already been sold. But among those left in the store yard was the perfect tree for Bonnie. Not purely Charlie Brown. Just a nice, not-too-branchy tree. A store employee cut a few inches off the bottom so it would stay fresh resting in the water of our tree stand, and helped me tie it to the station wagon roof rack.

 I was pretty pleased with myself, and after pulling onto our driveway went into the house and invited Lauren outside to see the wonderful tree I had bought for $10. And looking it over, with more wisdom than any 14-year-old should possess, she stared straight at me and gave me the come-uppance I so cheaply deserved: "I told you so."

 Epilogue 

 Bonnie continued over the years to demand a tree at Christmas, and I coped as well as I could. One year a local garden center was having its last-day going-out-of-business sale, and had a beautiful $500 artificial Christmas tree priced at 90 percent off. I told Bonnie.

 She said no.

 In 2019, my friend and former newspaper colleague Frank Roylance posted on Facebook that he and his wife were downsizing for a move into a condo and did anyone want their artificial Christmas tree -- free! And I jumped at it, begging Bonnie to relent. So off we went, to Frank's house north of the city, and together we managed to get the long and heavy box wedged into our hatchback car.

 We stored it on a high shelf in our backyard shed, but in ensuing years the tree just lay in its long heavy cardboard box. We were not able to set it up for Christmas in 2019, as I had just battled a life-threatening ordeal with a MRSA infection and sepsis.

 And in 2020, the pandemic turned our world upside-down. Bonnie late in the fall had surgery to remove her gallbladder, and there would be no Christmas fanfare. And in early January of 2021, as the first vaccines for Covid were rolling out, we learned that Bonnie had advanced and aggressive pancreatic cancer.

 A few weeks later, Bonnie wrote about the uncertainty of how long she would survive -- hoping that she might be able to attend a nephew's wedding, or see another Christmas with our families. But it was not to be. Her life journey ended in March, 10 days before the arrival of spring. 

 And the tree lay in its box in the shed, until this week.

 Inspired by a friend I have been dating in recent months, and her artificial but lovely tree I had helped assemble in her apartment (yeah, she is a Christian... just the way my life continues to play out... and seriously hard-wired for Christmas), I trudged back to my shed a few days ago and lugged that heavy box into my house. 

 Sunday night, I took it out -- it was in three pieces, the bottom and middle sections very heavy and the top relatively light. I cleared away from the living room half a dozen boxes of some of the too-much-stuff accumulated during four decades in suburbia, pieced the tree together in front of the bay front window, and plugged it in.

 Miraculously, every little light bulb on the seven-and-a-half-foot-tall tree was illuminated.

 On Monday morning, I climbed into the attic and went down to the basement to retrieve boxes of Christmas ornaments and decorations, including some that have outlived three marriages and half a century of moves, divorces and loss, and set to work.

 I had never in my entire life trimmed a Christmas tree solo, and I spent hours at the task, sorting through ornaments that came with memories of mostly happy times and joys.

Bonnie's 1944 ornament

 There were the sand dollars netted from the surf on Florida's Gulf coast by our kids in 1989, which they painted for that year's tree and endured for nearly 30 others over the course of our lives. Some were so beautiful and evoked such wonderful memories that I was in tears.

There's even a dragon ornament, purchased at a science fiction convention years ago -- before Game of Thrones hatched three of them into pop culture.

 The tree left only a few inches to spare below the ceiling, and was too tall for one tradition that had been a continuing bad joke: Deciding who gets to put the tree up the angel's butt. Well, that would be me this time. The angel was much too tall, so I set it on the windowsill next to an ornamental Buddha. Several smaller angels, in various sizes, found perches elsewhere on the tree.

 When I was done, I turned off the lights in the house and plugged in the tree.

 I was overwhelmed by its beauty

 And I thought maybe I wasn't really alone, after all. 

My 2023 tree, in its glory

 

Tree dragon

 

A closer look

 

Not a birth picture, but at least a birthday suit -- Bonnie Schupp poses for her first portrait in early 1945. This picture graced the bunk of her father Alvin on a U.S. Navy ship taking him to Italy near the end of World War II.

 

 Remembering Bonnie

on her birthday

 Today is Bonnie Schupp's 79th birthday. Or it would have been, had pancreatic cancer not intervened nearly three years ago.

 In between our respective bouts with life-threatening illness, we would talk on our occasional walks together about how to celebrate turning 80. We fantasized a big, catered party, inviting all of our friends and family. There would be performances by musician friends, a chance for others to say a few words -- kind or, preferably, funny about us and our relationships with them. It would be a celebration not only of our lives, but our friends while we still were around to appreciate and thank them.

 (We also poked fun at ourselves. For years on her birthday, I'd joke about how I'd never been to bed with anybody that old before.)

We did have a party, just not in the way it was intended. She only reached the age of 76. But it was a celebration of her life -- which she wanted instead of a funeral -- as well as the friendships that enriched it.

Age was not -- is not -- relevant. Especially not when it comes to love. It grows and endures.

 Poetic perspective

A few days ago, taking steps to freshen Bonnie's Google account so that the Overloads of Cyberspace would not erase her digital life, I stumbled onto her first efforts in blogging from the early days of the 21st Century. The blog was called "Blooming Journeys" -- its intent largely to post about the world of education, from the viewpoint of a retired teacher. It was a forerunner to her infinitely wider approach to blogging and creativity in an online journal of sorts, which she renamed simply "Journeys."

And one of those early "Blooming" entries was about being born, and a poem written on the day it happened by her great aunt, Gleasie Leatherbury.

 Here's what Bonnie posted:

 

Note: My great Aunt Gleasie, before she died while in her 90's, gave me this poem she wrote on the day I was born, December 10, 1944.

 

Fifteen Days Before Christmas

 

"Twas fifteen days before Christmas on a Sabbath morn,

In the Norfolk General Hospital, a baby was born.

There were other babies too--ones I've never seen

But this one in particular is little Bonnie Jean.



She was tucked in her basket with the greatest of care

Without the slightest idea that Daddy was near.

He was -- and Granddaddy too --

Awaiting news of a baby in blue.



Thirty hours he waited in great suspense,

Till the doctors thought he'd have no sense.

So he bit his nails and paced the floor,

When suddenly a nurse appeared in the door.



Said she, "Mr. Schupp, your wife presents you with a fine baby girl."

But she realized his head was still in a whirl

When he still imagined she had said a boy,

because like a sailor, he simply shouted, "Ship ahoy!"



Now that all is over, and Mother and baby are doing well,

Daddy feels much better too, as everyone could tell.

He is not disappointed, and confidentially I think,

He is perfectly satisfied with a little girl in pink. 

Bonnie in 2009, posing with one of her photographs -- an image of "Baltimore Hons" that remains a visual landmark in the window of M&T Bank on 36th Street in the city's Hampden neighborhood.

 

 

 

Then: At a guess, fourth grade at School No. 59. Me, upper right.

Memory Lane 

Pupils of School No. 59

have a 'final' hoorah

Louisa May Alcott closed 50 years ago

The hallways and classrooms emptied of children half a century ago, but memories of Baltimore's Louisa May Alcott School No. 59 were alive and mostly well on Sunday as about 100 of its pupils gathered at a suburban synagogue for what was billed as their "second final reunion."

 A few of them hobbled from the infirmities of aging -- and the oldest among them, Sylvia Cohn, at 98, had more difficulty with short-term memory than in recalling the lower Park Heights neighborhood of her childhood. She told of picking cherries from a tree behind the old Pratt Library branch half a block from the school on Keyworth Avenue.

Their school -- our school -- was shut down in 1972, viewed by the city as substandard, lacking a cafeteria and air-conditioning, but remains a landmark. Used for a time for regional offices and as a warehouse, then vacant for a decade, the oversize three-story brick and stucco building dating to 1910 nonetheless was added to the National Register of Historic Places in recognition of its architecture.

And for the last two decades, the restored building -- now known as Alcott Place -- has been lovingly maintained as subsidized housing for elderly residents. The principal's office is gone, replaced by an elevator shaft, and each classroom was turned into an efficiency apartment. A fourth level was added in a huge former attic space and turned into an activity and computer center with its own elevator from the third floor. 

 The school had a core group of teachers who lasted there long enough to have instructed multiple generations of the same families.

 Six years ago, days after his 94th birthday, I had the pleasure of taking the well-known Baltimore writer and storyteller Gilbert Sandler on a tour of our old neighborhood, and School 59, which we had attended 24 years apart. We both had "Miss Esther" Freilachoff in first grade. And we were given a tour of the building by a gentleman who lived there -- and showed us his apartment, in what had been my sixth-grade classroom.

In hallway on 2019 visit

 I attended the school from 1951 to June 1957, at the enrollment start of the postwar "baby boomer" era, from a neighborhood that was entirely white and largely Jewish. The reunion had demographics to match.

 The first black pupil at Louisa May Alcott arrived in September of 1957, three years after the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision ostensibly ending racial segregation of public schools. That year was also the beginning of a decade of rapid racial change that swept northwesterly along the Park Heights Avenue-Reisterstown Road corridor, with "blockbusting" tactics by real estate speculators scaring white homeowners to sell at distress prices and fueling much of the "white flight" toward the suburbs of Pikesville, Randallstown and Owings Mills. 

Interestingly, the reunion program book listed relatively recent housing sale prices, street by street, in some cases noting names of the School 59 children who had formerly lived in them -- a range from around $22,000 to a few exceeding $300,000.  Conditions along neighborhood streets range from third-worldly horror to decent and improving.

On Towanda Avenue, row house ruin a few blocks from School 59.

 My own street of 1940s-vintage row homes has held up well. (Taking a recent visitor on a tour of Baltimore, we encountered a woman unloading groceries outside her row house across Royce Avenue from the one where I had been raised. She told us she had moved from D.C. in buying it last year, that the former owner had died and it had been beautifully restored for sale. According to our program book, the price was $202,000.)

 The first School 59 reunion was held in 1993, attended by more than 800 former students -- a sell-out event from which more than 200 others were turned away because of space limitations at the catering hall. Sunday's gathering was the seventh -- and billed as the "second final reunion."

 Attendance at the previous gathering in 2017 had dropped to 151, according to Bob Cohen, a reunion committee member and master of ceremonies. 

 Only a few of those attending on Sunday live in the old neighborhood's 21215 Zip Code -- known postally as "Zone 15" back in the day. Most now have suburban addresses. But some came from long distances -- as far away as California, Arizona, Colorado, Texas and, of course, Florida. 

 Bob wrote in the program book that this final reunion was planned by "new blood" -- a committee of those "younger than 80." And most likely, it was the final final. 

And now, the final reunion: Hard to believe we were all once very young, at School 59.