My devices have not been working, modem and router. I have new ones but the new ones are apparently defective too, so it is a trip to the Time Warner store tomorrow. Technology, to make our lives easier and complicate them endlessly, apparently. When I was working my way through college at the J. C. Penney store in Tiffin, Ohio from 1958 to 1962 (it took me three tries to get the dates correct), I helped run the stock room (fantastic fun, unpacking merchandise, labeling it with the correct tags, sending it to the right department), did janitor work ("clean the women's restroom today, Startzman"), and clerk in men's wear on the weekends. The technology issue brought forth an image from that era. I remember a large table with merchandise, little transistor radios, under 10 dollars, from Japan. At that time Japan was known for inexpensive and somewhat shoddy stuff. Not many people wanted to take a chance. The interesting thing is that after all this time, they are still sitting there in my mind, waiting to be picked over and sold. Such a different time in so many ways. So many different experiences coming at me on the road before me: a three-guy road trip to Mexico in 1961 for enrollment in Mexico City college for six weeks in that summer; Graduate school at Ohio University where I learned what real learning was truly about and how exciting that was; and the innocent pleasures on weekends and in summers with real friends, all interested in the same texts, the same games ("murder" on the weekends--detective and villain); and Lake Hope in the summer.
We got a flat tire once on a back road in Southern Ohio on the way to Lake Hope. My very good, strong friend, Bill Elkins, who had played football for UK and EKU, two years each school, manned the tire iron. He tried and tried to get the nuts to unscrew but no luck. After about 15 minutes of gut-wrenching effort, one of the two somewhat scary-looking men sitting on a porch in front of a house about 50 yards back from the road, who had been watching the college boys effort, yelled down to us, "Them be right-handed nuts!" Bill tried them the other way and they came right off, even after all the tightening. Graduate school was an education in many ways. Everyone laughed. We yelled our thanks and drove off to go swimming.
The sad part of the memory is to know that Bill had heart trouble and apparently died on an operating table at age 62. Of all the people I have known and loved, for four years he was my best friend ever. He moved around a lot and later became a college president somewhere in Tennessee, I think, and wrote me a letter, inviting me to apply for the position of Dean there. Needless to say, I refused the offer, though I should have taken the time to go see him for what would have been one last meeting. But I didn't, and there it is.