Tag: Grindrod

As a devotee of Seinfeld during the show’s 180-episode run during its nine seasons from the late 1980s through most of the ‘90s, I remember most of the episodes’ openings, which feature Jerry in a nightclub setting doing his standup. In one of those openings, the routine focuses on the difference between how men watch TV and how women watch, depending upon who controls the remote.

Several years ago before the great basketball player John Havlicek’s passing in 2019, I had the good fortune to spend some time with John and his wife Beth. They were in Lima to take part in a golf outing to benefit cancer research and to see Gary Gearhart and his wife Kay. Gearhart was a teammate of Havlicek’s on Ohio State’s only NCAA championship squad back in 1960.

For everyone I know, seeing someone famous is rare unless you paid to see him or her on stage or at an athletic venue. When it happens, it always seems to give someone a story destined to be repeated.

Let me start by saying what I know about farming wouldn’t fill a thimble. A Chicagoan by birth and for the first six years of my life, I saw nothing in the way of an agrarian lifestyle. After my dad’s transfer to Ohio to take over a Central Steel and Wire sales territory, during the early June drive in 1958 to some place called Lima, Ohio, the topographical changes I saw amazed me. I left a world of mostly concrete and a dearth of greenery to field after field rife with growth.

In the 1935 Broadway musical “Dumbo,” Jimmy Durante was leading an elephant across the stage when stopped by a policeman. Asked what he was doing with the elephant, Durante replied, “What elephant?” As time evolved since that early refusal to acknowledge something as obvious as an elephant on a stage, the expression “the elephant in the room” has come to mean that obvious something that someone refuses to see.

With fall’s commencement, for me, there’s always an urge to take some inventory of what transpired over the summer. There were the positives, such as warmer weather that comes as a welcome relief to all who call Ohio home.

When it comes to acts of kindness, there are indeed so many ways positively to impact others.

On the eve of this Labor Day, a lot will be written about the jobs that have always been the backbone of this country, so I will join the rest of what in another era were called scribes who’ve penned their laborious passages.

In my current line of work, I spend a considerable amount of time behind the wheel and staring through a windshield. These days I do far more driving than I used to do back in my teaching days when I spent no fewer than 10 hours a day in the same room, Room 16, in an old high school building over in St. Marys, a building that no longer blocks the view of Skip Baughman Stadium from West South Street.

For generations, those who mourn the passing of others have tried in some public displays to honor the memory of the departed. The practice goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks and Romans, who constructed monuments similar to those seen in cemeteries today. The markers erected all fall under the umbrella of what has come to be known as funerary art.