Around the time of the 9/11 attacks I used to shop at one particular grocery. The shift supervisor for the baggers was a competent and efficient young man who always wore a name tag identifying him as Muhammad. Immediately after the attacks he got a new tag. He was now Mo. I was sad and disturbed at this necessity. I was very happy for him when, a year or two later, he felt safe enough to start using his full name again. I haven't seen him in years and hope he's well. #OldStories

My ultra nerdy & law abiding Dad booted me from the nest with this crime advice:
Steer clear of narks; they're trouble.
The dangers of drugs are overblown, but street drugs aren't made in FDA certified labs & are untrustworthy.
Keep a reasonable amount of cash in your wallet for muggers; they get mad & beat you up if you tell them you got nothing.
Always check your lugnuts before getting into your car; you don't want a wheel to fall off if you interrupted someone stealing it.
#OldStories

My favorite prank. I had keys to the office and a reputation for being dull. I recruited the other dullest person to come in early. Upon arrival we set about shrink wrapping every item in our victim's office. The books. The pens. The stress ball. The keyboard. Even the phone, with a small opening so we could plug it back in. Anything that fit got wrapped. Then we locked up and went to breakfast. We returned, innocent faced, to join the crowd of gawking coworkers. #OldStories

2/2 My current house is in a neighborhood built in 1950's. Originally none of the houses had AC. Instead they had large fans built into the attic crawlspaces. The fans would vent the hot air out from under the roof and draw cooler air up into the living spaces of the house. The family that previously owned my house pretty much ruined the thermal properties of the building by removing the attic fan and installing multiple skylights. The house heats up dreadfully in the summer now. #OldStories

1/2 I grew up in a neighborhood of 1920's stone and brick houses. Few of us had AC. Instead most houses had canvas awnings shading the windows. The occupants would open the windows every evening and close up again in the morning. The combination of shaded windows and solid walls kept the houses tolerable through much of the summer. Each autumn a swarm of workers would remove the canvas & awning frames, replacing them with storm windows. The reverse happened every spring. #OldStories

On the street where I live now all the houses, built in the 1950s, once had an underground tank for the storage of food waste. A local pig farmer would collect the slops at some regular interval. I can't imagine modern health authorities being ok with that practice. #OldStories 2/2

Thinking about how people used to deal with trash disposal. On the street where I spent my childhood all the houses, built in the 1920s, had a built-in trash incinerator. Ours was next to the furnace. Burning refuse was forbidden by time we bought the house, so we ignored the incinerator apart from the time a squirrel fell down the chimney & needed to be rescued using my butterfly net. He destroyed the net en route to freedom. It gave me a whole new respect for squirrel teeth.
#OldStories 1/2

I recently picked up a bottle locally produced milk at a mom & pop store. Part of the transaction was a tender & apologetic explanation of how glass bottle deposits & returns work. I was amused. I grew up in a time warp locality that still used returnable glass bottles for Coke, so I knew the drill. Only the deposit fee had changed. The purchase reminded me we once had recycling built into the economy, and we accepted it as normal.#OldStories

One of my extended family members was the child of an urban grocer during the Great Depression. Store managers weren't supposed to extend credit, but often they did. This could get them in trouble during store audits. They hid the cash discrepancies by using their kids to shuttle boxes of cigarettes (small and high value) between stores. While the adults distracted the auditor the kids would load up their wagons with cartons and quickly hoof it to the next grocery down the street. #OldStories

When I was a teen my mother related one of the minor tragedies of her teen years. Having saved up her spending money she pedaled her bicycle to the shop and bought a lacquer 78 record of a favorite big band. She stopped at a friend's house on the way home to show it off. Somehow it got dropped, and it shattered. She loved CDs when they came along, lol. #OldStories #78rpm

The playground at my childhood school was not kind to the clumsy. Asphalt footing, tall equipment with no safety rails. Skinned knees were a given. A safety review concluded the playground needed to be cushioned in bark mulch. Instead the parks department dumped tree trimmings that had gone through a wood chipper. Round twigs that would roll & turn your ankle. Sharp points when one fell. Constant splinters. I preferred the original asphalt. #OldStories

As a kid I went to a summer camp with horses. Some of the horses were boarded there year round by non-campers. One of these teenaged non-campers had taught her horse to rear when she pulled back on the reins. We kids thought this was incredibly cool. The camp director did not and hauled her into the office for a scorching lecture. I think the director had visions of horses flipping over backwards and campers impaled on saddle horns. #OldStories

One of the random joys of childhood was to find a length of telephone cable snipped and discarded by one of the line repair crews. Inside the sheathing would be an assortment of rainbow hued copper wires. They kept me entertained for hours. Sometimes I would wrap the wires around nails to make electromagnets. Other times I would coil the wires carefully around themselves to make small figurines: people, horses, dragons. #OldStories

My grandmother, orphaned in her teens, was fostered by a politically active bachelor uncle. One of her memories was sitting at dinner while he voiced his thoughts on automobile speed limit legislation: "Hmph! Six miles an hour is fast enough for anybody!"
#OldStories

Dad was one of the emergency contact people for the local morgue. So, one weekend the puma at the local zoo keels over. The zoo wants to do a necropsy but not on the weekend. They call Dad. Can we put our dead cat in your morgue? Dad says sure and goes back to his weekend, thinking nothing more of it. Monday morning the morgue staff roll in to work and unexpectedly find a 200 pound apex predator in a drawer. Apparently this was a little WTF even for them. Dad was nerdishly gleeful. #OldStories

When my father was a small child his parents and their neighbors used the services of a traveling flock of sheep to trim their lawns. The shepherd would move the flock between his customers' lawns and prevent the sheep from eating the flowers & shrubbery. I was envious when I heard this story; I would have loved to have sheep visiting my house when I was young. #OldStories

Years ago my commute to work took me past a public park with a wide green lawn. Every morning, without fail, an Airdale terrier would be there playing fetch with its owner. The terrier would stand focused, tail wagging, one paw slightly raised in preparation to run. The owner would stand equally intent, ball launcher at the ready, before hurling the ball out across the grass. I always admired the pair for making this time each day to tend to each other's needs. #OldStories #Dogs

Mom had an odd way of dealing with my exposure to PG & R movie content. She sent me off to see questionable movies. Upon return I needed to rate the suitability for parental date night, specifically if it would ick out my dad. I blew it on Tootsie; I thought Dad would be skeeved by Dustin Hoffman in drag. Oh, no, Mom assured me. He'll think it's normal & hilarious. Let me tell you about the Whiffenpoofs and other men's college performance groups back in the day...
#OldStories #drag

I was lucky to grow up where food security was not a concern. I was utterly confused as a young adult, living far from where I grew up, when I kept offending people by accepting or rejecting offers of food. Finally someone local explained the rules. I should reject the first offer. The family is being polite, but they may need that food for their next meal. They won't offer again if so. Accept the second offer. This offer is real, and they will be hurt if I don't accept. #OldStories

A piece from a few years ago. I created ‘Dance of the Selkies’ for an art auction for wildlife. Original Unseen design, hand burned onto the wood. #art #folklore #craft #handmade #pyro #pyrography #burn #wildlife #nature #selkies #animals #ocean #sea #tales #oldstories #stories #seals #wood #woodworking #artist #artistsonmastodon