Opinions

It might have been columnist Peg Bracken, or perhaps Erma Bombeck, who wrote that kids should be like pancakes; that we should be allowed to throw away the first one after we’d messed up and ended up with a burned flapjack (i.e. spoiled brat).

Since the new cars first came on the market in late summer, there’s been one new car commercial that has become increasingly annoying. It concerns a car with sensors that will cause an automatic braking system to kick in if an obstacle is too close, thus avoiding, or at least minimizing, an accident. While I admire the technology, I abhor the grammar. To be specific; a voice asks, “Imagine you could predict an accident before it happens?”

Don’t worry, I’m not going to actually list that many ways to use pumpkins. There may not be that many– on the other hand, there may be considerably more, but I fall asleep about time my list gets up into the late teens. This time of year, when supermarket parking lots are overflowing with those big orange orbs and all their pink, white, green, red and brown cousins, and every farmers’ market and farmer’s child has a sign out front advertising bargain prices for them, I wonder just what happens to all of them, once Halloween and Thanksgiving are over and forgotten.

When asked if I had any photos of my old friend Norma who died, I thought, with dismay, about the jumble of snapshots that clutter up my desk, the bottom drawer of my dresser, a box under my bed, that small wooden chest on the bookshelf, and an old suitcase in the furnace room. There are a few more places that might yield something, too, that tin box on the top shelf of the linen closet, and a fat envelope of assorted precious junk I once slipped under the place mats and tablecloths in the dining room hutch. It’d take me weeks to go through all that.

You’d think that between pot smoking, whiskey-drinking gnomes on one side, and ghost trains on the other, that the apartment complex I mow has more than its fair share of paranormal activity.
Think again.