Bring Back the Key!

I'm lactose intolerant.

So you don't like my attempts for drive through titles?

Butrflynet, I finger for a sharpener!!! You must really like sharp knives. Hang onto your digits, kid. You never know when a pinky will come in handy. You car culture folks. A drive-thru is of little or no value in the Big Apple.

osso, A drive-thru soup and salad. Not a bad idea. As for the names. No comment.

Here's another one. Phone booths. I have one particular phone booth in mind. In the drugstore around the corner from our house. It was wood (oak, I think) and glass. It had a folding door and a seat. Great to play in while my mother was doing her drugstore business. Then they went to stand-up phone booths. Then no-door stand-up phone booths. Then a phone on a stick. Sigh.

Uh, oh. Maybe I shouldn't have brought up that phone booth. It was a player in one of the more traumatic experiences of my childhood. I should be fully over it by the time I hit seventy. I don't like to rush into anything.

I thought about chocolate pudding--made from a box. I loved licking out the pot. Then another traumatic memory popped into my head. Upsetness.

I'm gonna try to stick to things that are more recent.

I just thought of something else--no traumas attached. Lamps that had dingle-dangles instead of switches. Who doesn't like a good dingle-dangle?

I delivered milk one summer just after highschool. My friend was a milkman and in a band. They got a touring gig so I did his route. I loaded the truck at 3 am, and delivered to about 10, the final stops were usually mom'n'pop shops.
Every house in this area built during 50's or so, has a milk door. It's a little door, about 1ft square, that sits at waist height next to the back door. It was for milk delivery. In the summer it provided respite from the heat and prevented the milk from freezing in the winter.
Milk delivery no longer exists here, and I don't drink the stuff, so when I remodeled I closed mine in.

When my grandmother first came to Canada, she needs some ground beef. So she went to the local grocery store and asked the butcher for a lb of mincemeat. He handed her two jars of mincemeat - raisins, citrus peels and suet. She thought this was a very strange country.

You did that with your Nazi spoon, didn't you?

Yes! Good grief, you've got a memory. Holy ****. The nazi spoon.

How could I ever forget the Nazi spoon.

The spoon is a big FU to hate.

Make pudding, not war.

Sen-Sen on the counter at the grocery store.
White butcher's paper.
Milk with cream on the top.

edgar, I remember Sen-Sen being on the counter at every store. I kept asking my parents what it was. They were always reluctant to provide me with an explanation. Why? Dunno.

I don't remember white butcher paper. Brown in this neck of the woods. I suspect that if I went to an actual butcher's, they'd still have the paper. No such paper in the supermarket.

Don't know nuttin' about cream on top of the milk.

Have any of these been improved away? Were they fun? No contact. Can't be sure. But I do know this, edgar. You and I grew up in very different worlds.

Of course. I was a son of an Okie from Muskogee. We picked the crops and we lived like nomads. Then lived with a man who did short order cook and we lived like nomads. I was getting pretty big before I remember a porcelain toilet. We were still putting ice in the ice box long after most neighbors had refrigerators. The family car was a '29 Dodge as late as 1949.

I did that when I was 16. For $1 an hour. Don't miss it.

I think about that, and my mom whenever I throw the clothes in the washing machine and they are done when it beeps.

She spent a lot of her time moving clothes from one tub to another and through the ringer.

I remember that. Filled the bucket at the hand pump.

edgar, Very, very different worlds. I had no idea that there was such a thing as outdoor plumbing until I saw an outhouse when I was up in the country. When we were having supper and someone wanted a glass of water, we just got up and went to the sink.

IR, We had washing machines in the basement and indoor plumbing. If there was a gas station in the vicinity, it was news to me. I'm a city kid.

Just remembered something else that was fun that was improved out of existence. Dumb waiters. The super would start the dumb waiter (a platform that moved up and down on pulleys--the platform was for garbage) and start yelling. Then the tenants would put their garbage on the platform and yell back. Then the super would move the platform to the next floor and yell. In addition to yelling back and forth to the super, the tenants would have conversations. I loved all that yelling. Very neighborly.

Now there's a chute down the hall. No yelling. No platform. Sigh.

We had one of those wringer washers, but my memory on it is faint, must have been in Ohio. I've more of a memory of my aunt (the one I call my hundred year old aunt) having a Mangle for ironing. Something like this:

I had a dumb waiter (not a person) in my last house. Miss that house.

I put my trash in a can out back. Take it to the recycle center once a week. No super here.

Yes, my mom had a mangle too. No permanent press then.

I knew of dumbwaiters, but always thought they were for laundry.