Be it duly noted that on this Valentines Day my dear Judy and I luncheoned at one of Morristown, NJ’s most fanciful and quixotic restaurants, THE COMMITTED PIG. How better to heed the occasion than to spend the lunching hour with my dedicated bride and a pork roll sandwich?

After 40 years of wedded bliss, I doubt it gets better than this !

Perhaps you remember my picking on this town before, Worcester, Massachusetts that is. A tired old industrial town with plenty of tired old industrial buildings that typify a look that is so very New England. If only these classic structures could talk ! Who knows what tales of toil born within their walls would be told ?

Over time it is likely that many of these buildings will be refurbished and returned to their past stature. Certainly they still have “good bones”. That fact alone should go a long way toward the renaissance of this old town.

We were up in Sutton, Mass. this weekend celebrating Sunshine and Vanessa’s birthdays, thus our close brush with Worcester. Recall, if you may, my past account of Jude and I perusing through Worcester years ago when we found ourselves a bit overcome with hunger.

Perhaps it was a Sunday morning. Nothing was open that even nearly resembled a restaurant. We found a bar on a destitute street corner that at least emitted a pale ray of light from the window. In we walked .

“Any chance we could get a little something to eat here”, we inquired of the barmaid .

Oddly, she gave us a deer in the headlights stare, as though that was the strangest question ever asked in the place.

“No, we don’t do anything like that here”, she replied.

A sole female customer sat at the bar hovering over her mug of beer. With a half-chuckle through a beer surface, she barely murmured “Welcome to Worcester .”

Thereinafter, those very same words are an adjunct to our lexicon. And the lady who spoke those words? I have to imagine that she’s still sitting at that bar, dozing and grumbling over her blessed mug !

Little must she know that her words, “Welcome to Worcester” are indelibly etched in the minds of a couple of out-of-town Jerseyites, complete with imitation of her beer mug accent .

Mr. Cleaves, Orrie, as folks called you, we whisked past the old farm today here on Quakertown hill. I was caused to think of you.

Would you even recognize the place now? The dairy barn is gone, just recently torn down. The beer grains pit is gone. The Capron boys kept that full, didn’t they?

No, there’s scarcely a sign of your decades of toil that happened here. Kind of a shame, isn’t it? Folks blink as they drive by and see not a vestige of your life’s work.

But, hey, all that any of us did was milk cows. That’s not cause for any carving in stone. Just know, Mr. Cleaves that your years of labor are silently woven in to the fabric of this windswept hill.

To this day, a farm kid 50 years your junior writes about what you did.

How could these winter mornings not remind me ?

1962. For days the mercury hovered near zero. That didn’t matter. The cattle still needed feeding, not to mention milking.

Lest I forget, 15 or 20 heifers, a small flock of laying hens, a couple of pigs and a bull all needed attention, too. A swarm of cats populated the barn for mouse control. By and large, there was plenty to do before and after school.

The work started well before daylight. The initial walk from the house to the barn seemed an unspeakable gauntlet that defied every crunching footstep. The cold produced tears in my eyes that were frozen before they hit the ground.

To a young kid, there seemed plenty that wasn’t right about this, and I suppose there was. Was I going to voice objection ? That, too, was unspeakable if a wrath was to be avoided. Better to just let it go and get the work done.

I did have my own little world, however. It was in front of the heat radiator in the living room. It was here where the chill disappeared, here where I hung my tattered cloth gloves invariably wet from watering livestock earlier each morning.

I could “regroup” in front of that radiator and painstakingly spread out those gloves to insure complete dryness before I had to put them on again. If I didn’t do it, nobody would. It was a simple lesson, but a good one .

Be it noted that on this date television news coverage of a snow storm on the east coast has reached new levels on the wussification scale. Yes, it is a snow storm, not an extraordinary one, but yes a snow storm. In a few locations there might be up to 2 feet of snow.

On the Jersey coast, more like 1 foot or less. Well less inland. Winds could reach 60 MPH. What may be its most noteworthy property, however, is how quickly it will be over.

Be that as it may, the most notable aspect of this storm is really the theatre with which it is reported to the public. For most intents and purposes, this storm is a dreadful apocalypse, every measure of which presages man’s imminent demise. Snowmeggedon! Lights out.

All live reports are centered on one subject… the snow storm. Any other news items that might exist in the world today couldn’t possibly be of equal gravity to this storm. Other places in the world just have to wait.

In a recent press conference, which are conspicuously rare for this White House, Fox News reporter Peter Doocy asked President Biden if he thought that inflation would be a political liability in the upcoming mid-term elections.

That was really no more of a ‘gotcha’ question than the balance of others asked that day. Nonetheless, because of it Mr. Biden referred to Doocy as a “stupid son of a bitch”. This,of course, after campaign promises to bring America together and tone down divisive rhetoric.

What question would I have asked had I been one of the reporters in the room? The possibilities are legion . Our nation is beset with a plethora of nagging complications. One I find to be particularly gaulling. It is of Biden’s own making. In fact, he invited it.

I can quote verbatim the “huddled masses” message inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, but that inscription does not say that America should have no borders. It seems now, however, that our southern border has been abandoned. Immigrants by the many thousands waltz across the Rio Grande already knowing that a spanking new airplane will transport them to whatever city for a new life in America.

We citizens, of course, would pay dearly for such a flight, but the illegals have a new credential in America, our laws and our borders be damned.

So who is the stupid son of a bitch ? Is it me? Is it the voter? One thing seems to be true: It must take one to know one .

It’s in North Naples on Immokalee Road, not your Grandmother’s grocery store. It’s 75,000 square feet of , yes, groceries, but that’s only where it starts. Does your grocery store have a live band playing past favorites right there as you walk in ? Does it have a few restaurants? SEED TO TABLE does.

How about a fish market, a butcher shop, a two-story wine section and a full-service bakery? Of course, an ice cream shop, a juice and smoothie bar, an extensive deli and cheese section and a sushi bar ?

To boot, the produce sold here is organically grown right here on their own farm, that’s right, just outside.

For the harried housewife or the deficient Dad in the kitchen, there is a choice of ready-made meals here that surely please !

Heck, this is a grocery store on steroids !

Having listened the day long to the ceaseless rolling whisper of the waves here in Naples, is it any wonder that the poem, thus named and written by Longfellow, should become affixed in my mind? A further wonder is the fact that I studied it 50 years ago in Ms. Reichert’s Del-Val English class. Ah, the power of well-chosen words !

Do yourself the favor of googling The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. It’s very brief, but see if the verses don’t have you feeling the rhythm of the waves.

January 19, 2022

VENUE: JERSEY MIKE’S ARENA, PISCATAWAY, NJ

THE RAC, RUTGERS’ HOME BASKETBALL COURT

CONFERENCE: BIG 10

The most impressive part of tonight’s game was how UNimpressive the score was. Rutgers 48 Iowa 46 . .. a defensive clinic to the bitter end.

Iowa’s Steve Keegan, the most prolific scorer in the nation, was curbed to 13 points. The most impressive part of Iowa’s offense was the total of air balls and shot clock violations. Rutgers all but shut down one of the standout offenses in the nation.

The Scarlet Knights are fast becoming a team of memorable performances. Earlier this season, December 9 (2021) #1 Purdue visited here and were treated to a solemn ride back home to Indiana . In the final 13 seconds, Rutgers’ Ron Harper rebounded, dribbled to half-court and shot. Nothing but net. Rutgers 70 – Purdue 68 . Bedlam ensued at the RAC.

I would posit that athletic competition on the college level is one of our national treasures, still pure and excellent. It is where young ladies and gentlemen play their hearts out , much to the enjoyment of our people and yet without the vicissitudes wrought by the almighty buck.

I watched Ron Harper’s post-game TV interview. He was intelligent and well-spoken . I’ll be ridiculed for saying this, but I had this thought: If our colleges are producing individuals of this character, then we’re doing alright for ourselves.

JANUARY 16, 2022–The Gulf worked itself into a tumultuous uproar this morning. The wind stirred the waves into some serious white caps, as compared to the normally quiescent action of the water’s meeting Florida’s west coast.

We think of rain pouring down, but this morning it blew sideways rearranging lanai furniture in a nonsensical contortion. This was not an ordinary rain storm. It was malicious.

Then the alarms began their hideous beeping… tornado warnings, they were. Up on the eighth floor of the building those beeps seemed to impart a more serious tone ! I guess it was just the distance of the drop from there to ground level.

What’s the expression? Built like a brick sh-t house. Certainly that would apply to this building, but that seems of small consolation when contemplating the thought of it getting whacked by a tornado. There is no good result !

For starters, we thought, get to the ground floor while the elevator still works. My wheelchair doesn’t work very well going down stairs ! So down we went. A message on the cell phone indicated that a tornado watch would last for about a half hour.

In the meantime, the ground floor did seem safer than the eighth. Curiously though, no one else in the building agreed. Jude and I were the only ones down there. So we slung the bull for half an hour and back up we went. Indeed, a look outside appeared as though the weather had backed off a little.

In little more than a few minutes, there went those hideous beeps again. Yes, the cell phone indicated the tornado watch to be back on.Yes, back on the elevator we went, fortunately with no interruption of electricity. This second tornado watch lasted for twenty minutes. Again, we were not joined by anyone else in the building.

I started to question the bizarre nature of this whole exercise. Was Nature rendering some quizzical lesson here? The vicissitudes in humankind’s propensity to conform. Why wasn’t anybody coming to the ground floor? Surely others knew what was going on. Were we the idiots or were they ? If someone told you right now to go jump in a lake, would you do it ?

Wouldn’t you know it? After returning back to the eighth floor, that damned alarm sounded a third time. Back down stairs we re-entered the realm of the absurd; anticipating the tornado that never was and was never wanted.

We came to find out that a twister was spotted in the Golden Gate section of Naples. Undoubtedly that is as close as we ever wish to come to one of these beasts! Waiting in the stairwell was bad enough.