Tag: ABC Wednesday

M is for Mill Valley, California

The song spent only a couple weeks on the lower rungs of the Billboard pop charts, peaking at #90 in 1970.

Me writing about Mill Valley is the fault of Mexican food and a famous director.

For dinner during the last week in December 2016, my bride made tacos. We hadn’t had them, either at home or in a restaurant, in months. And I – as is my wont – started singing The Taco Man, actually The Candy Man, but with a word change. You may know the 1972 hit by Sammy Davis Jr. That made her think of I’d Like To Teach the World to Sing by the New Seekers from that same year.

She also recalled a song called Mill Valley. I know LOTS of songs from the late 1960s and early 1970s, but I didn’t know this one. She even knew the lyrics!

I’m gonna talk about a place
That’s got a hold on me,
Mill Valley
A little place where life
Feels very fine and free,
Mill Valley
Where people aren’t afraid to smile
And stop and talk with you awhile,
And you can be as friendly
As you want to be.
Mill Valley!

As it turns out, a teacher named Rita Abrams wrote the song and recorded with children at the school where she was teaching, released under the name Miss Abrams and the Strawberry Point Third Grade Class. The song spent only a couple weeks on the lower rungs of the Billboard pop charts, peaking at #90 in 1970.

But it must have done better with those easy-listening stations that weren’t playing Mama Told Me Not To Come by Three Dog Night or Ball of Confusion by the Temptations, because it’s been referred to as a radio staple.

There were stories in Newsweek, Life Magazine and Rolling Stone. “Annie Liebovitz stood on top of the piano to take our picture,” the educator recalled. An album, which referred to the students as 4th graders, which they were by then, was released.

Ironically, there were 2014 stories suggesting the teacher-turned-songwriter could no longer afford to live in her Mill Valley condo because of rising real estate costs.

Rita Abrams and her class had a 45th reunion in 2015.

And the director who made the video? An obscure young director named Francis Ford Coppola, who, two years later, would be directing the film that would win the Oscar for Best Movie, The Godfather.

ABC Wednesday – Round 20

The Lydster natal day edition

The Daughter is now a teenager. She’s 5 feet, 9 inches, or 1.75 meters, tall. She is enjoying middle school pretty well after the adjustment period. Among other things, she’s figured out it’s easier to take the “blue” bus to Western Avenue then take the #10 regular CDTA bus than to take the crowded “brown” bus which would take her a block from our house.

2010

She is extremely talented. She created this little paper box for her mother for Valentine’s Day. It’s full of little pictures of my wife, including some in her childhood, plus pictures of herself, me and the cats. It must have been very time-consuming.

For me, she got this large box. But it was a ruse, because it was filled with a dozen and a half strips of paper on why she cares for me. The initial tag said, “I couldn’t think of anything,” but she was kidding:

You wake me up [not always easy]
You love cats [actually a drawing of a cat rather than the word]
You make good pancakes
You help me leave for school
You give me money
We watch the news
You help me with my homework [probably my #1 task for her]
You tolerate your life [I do not know what that means]
You play Sorry [board game]
You play Uno [card game]
Supergirl [we watched the TV series together]
You and I Love Lucy [she’s been watching the box set]
You are FUN
Your wisdom
You force me to go to bed
You read to me
*You love me [that, I do]

She has a strong sense of justice, and likes to participate in working on houses with a church group, or the like.

She presently has two bedrooms, one tiny one where she sleeps, and the somewhat (SOMEWHAT?) untidy room where her clothes are. She tends to do her crafts there.

We had promised her a phone months, before she went to middle school, but she did not get one until Christmas. She likes playing a particular game that involves finding three-, four-, and five letter words from a set of five or six letters.

Right now, she says she wants to be a lawyer, but I think she’ll do something more artistic. Maybe she’ll do both.

Happy natal day, dear daughter.

Also for ABC Wednesday, Round 20

K is for kaleidoscopes (ABC Wednesday)

The World’s Largest Kaleidoscope is not all that far from where I live!

There are certain things, such as fireworks and kaleidoscopes, that are never as impressive in graphic representation than they are in real life.

If you read the definition, you get no idea just how wonderful kaleidoscopes can be: “An optical instrument with two or more reflecting surfaces inclined to each other in an angle, so that one or more (parts of) objects on one end of the mirrors are seen as a regular symmetrical pattern when viewed from the other end, due to repeated reflection.

“The reflectors (or mirrors) are usually enclosed in a tube, often containing on one end a cell with loose, colored pieces of glass or other transparent (and/or opaque) materials to be reflected into the viewed pattern. Rotation of the cell causes motion of the materials, resulting in an ever changing viewed pattern.”

I was reminded of this when I was helping The Daughter clean out her room recently. I came across one of my old kaleidoscopes which I either lent her or she “borrowed.” It was so much fun looking through it that I borrowed it back.

NASA has provided instructions on making a kaleidoscope, appropriate, since its Hubble looked into a cosmic kaleidoscope last year.

I’ve just discovered that the Guinness-certified World’s Largest Kaleidoscope is not all that far from where I live, on Route 28 in Mount Tremper, Ulster County, New York. It stands 56 feet tall and is 38 feet in diameter. The family NEEDS to go this year!

Of course, my first thought involving the word is to the song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds by some Liverpudlian band on their Sgt. Pepper album, featuring the line “The girl with kaleidoscope eyes.” Apparently the reference is to one Yoko Ono.

Listen to Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds:
The Beatles, from the movie Yellow Submarine
Elton John, #1 in the US for 2 weeks in 1975, with the Reggae guitars of Dr. Winston O’Boogie.

J is for Japan, the US and World War II

The visit by Abe to Pearl Harbor comes after many years of debate in the U.S., Japan and elsewhere about how the two nations should come to terms with the legacy of World War II

I was thrilled by a pair of events addressing the historic Japan-United States enmity of the 1940s.

In May 2016, then-President Barack Obama visited Hiroshima, the first American commander-in-chief to do so since the US dropped an atomic bomb on the city over 70 years earlier.

While criticized by those on the left and the right, I thought it was an important gesture. “As he promised, the president did not apologize for the U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, which killed an estimated 215,000 people. He laid a wreath at Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima and embraced a 91-year-old survivor of the nuclear attack.”

During his 20-minute remarks, “Obama said, ‘Why do we come to this place, to Hiroshima? We come to ponder the terrible forces unleashed in the not so distant past. We come to mourn the dead … their souls speak to us and ask us to look inward. To take stock of who we are and what we might become.’

“In the Hiroshima museum’s guest book before his speech, the President wrote that he hoped the world will ‘find the courage, together, to spread peace, and pursue a world without nuclear weapons.’‎” Most of the elderly survivors, I imagine, did not foresee an American President in their midst, in that place.

Then, in December 2016, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe offered his condolences for his country’s attack on Pearl Harbor. “‘We must never repeat the horrors of war again, this is the solemn vow the people of Japan have taken,” he said. The Prime Minister was accompanied by President Obama, making the visit the first by the leaders of both countries.

“Mr. Abe paid tribute to the [2,400] men who lost their lives in 1941 at the naval base, many of whom remain entombed in the wreckage of the USS Arizona, sunk by the Japanese that day, and vowed reconciliation and peace.

How did this come about?

“Just as was the case when Obama visited Hiroshima earlier in the year—as the first sitting U.S. President to go to the site of the atomic bombing—the visit by Abe comes after many years of debate in the U.S., Japan and elsewhere about how the two nations should come to terms with the legacy of World War II.”

Mr. Abe never actually apologized, but as one elderly Pearl Harbor survivor noted, the Prime Minister’s presence was even more important.

H is for Doctor Henry Heimlich

In 2016, Heimlich himself performed the maneuver on an 87-year-old woman.

Henry Heimlich, the doctor who invented a lifesaving anti-choking procedure, died at the age of 96 in December 2016. He had some controversial medical theories, especially during his later years. But the Heimlich maneuver saved countless lives.

“Performing abdominal thrusts involves a rescuer standing behind a patient and using his or her hands to exert pressure on the bottom of the diaphragm. This compresses the lungs and exerts pressure on any object lodged in the trachea, hopefully expelling it.”

The trick about the Heimlich maneuver is that one cannot really practice it on a real person, only a dummy. I learned it at a Red Cross training that I took in high school back in the late 1960s.

On a Sunday in May of 1995, I was in a real funk and had been in a pretty sour mood. I had to go to my ex’s place and get the last of my stuff. Then I had to go visit a choir member in the hospital who was dying. I didn’t bother to go to church for worship and only went to the meal afterward because I promised I would.

This woman, who was over 80 and who I did not know, was off to the side from the dining area, looking as though she were turning blue. Then someone opined that perhaps she might have eaten something. I recalled my training from high school but was worried about perhaps breaking a rib, which I knew could happen.

Still, I utilized it for the first time. After one thrust, some piece of meat came from her mouth and flew at least 15 feet. The pastor at the time – this was in my old church – was always one to come up with a smart-aleck remark. He said to me, “If you see ME choking, just let me die.”

Three years later, when I got the JEOPARDY! Information Sheet that asked for five items that they would use for their “chat cards”. I wrote, among other things about Earl Warren, Rod Serling, mountain climbing, and LPs, “The Heimlich maneuver works!”

Earlier in 2016, Heimlich himself performed the maneuver on an 87-year-old woman seated next to him at the senior community where he lived. The Heimlich maneuver is one of the most used medical procedures used by non-medical personnel.

ABC Wednesday – Round 20

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