Vacation over time to blog

I'm back and I've neglected my dear old blog. As many of you know I'm not a big blog guy. I do it, but I'm not convinced there are all these people clamoring to read what I have to say.

But then I learned something this weekend that surprised me. You see just around noon time today Barrett Weiser will settle in with his sandwich and the rest of his lunch and read my blog. How do I know this? Barrett told me so himself on Saturday night. He stopped by the house with his wonderful wife Colleen. They assured me they are avid readers of my blog.

Of course by divulging this information, a team of guys in white coats are probably chasing them down right about now. But they say they aren't crazy, they enjoy the read.

Actually they kind of like my reflections on my childhood in Sunland Tujunga. Now admittedly I don't write about that much, but I do visit it on occasion. Now you maybe reading this and thinking Sunland-Tujunga, wow they are the twin cities, sort of like the Minneapolis-St. Paul of the west coast. You couldn't be more wrong, there is no way to describe these towns. So I won't waste my time trying.

It was fun talking to Barrett and Colleen about our childhoods there. It was a simple time, when people let their kids go off for hikes in the canyons, and hills. Parents didn't think twice about letting their kids wander around town. Now days we are very overprotective. Do we really need to be? After talking to them I thought for sure the answer was no. That we tend to overreact. But that's not how they see it. They think times have changed, we need to change with them, it is a different world than the one we grew up in. That seems so sad to me.

On the way into work this morning I was listening to C-SPAN. There was a segment on book notes about Senator Sam Ervin. It kind of irritated me that the event was in Raleigh, and the guy introducing the author of the new book on Ervin kept calling him "Irving." How do you get away with that? But I'm digressing. I remember Ervin because he was on TV on every channel, every day one summer. He was the chair of the Senate hearings into Watergate.

At any rate, the author Karl Campbell talked about the Senator's childhood. It was a time of joy, when he could read books on his porch during the summer months, and near the fire in the wintertime. The bottom line Ervin felt like it was a happy time in which "you had time to live."

I guess that is the bottom line, maybe we all look back at our childhood times with joy, because we had time to live. Now we are all going so fast, we don't really even have time to live. We are just racing. So maybe when our kids hit our age they'll probably look back with whimsy at their childhood too.