Curb Appeal 

Street curbs are designed to contain the street and its users. The majority of street trash accumulates there in the curb line for sweepers like Daisy Paolucci and other town persons who feel civic responsibility for a clean town. They broom sweep even though the town contracts truck born sweepers to clean the streets. These, town civic minded sweepers, have a calling rather than a duty placed on them by others. 

Curb lines have quite a history. Back, before passable alleys, all garbage collections were situated there. Every type of container was used before the borough tried its hand at imposing standardization. Remember, in olden days, every household burnt coal as wood availability declined, in either case, both created volumes of ash which were put out at the curb as part of the trash cycle. Then, the country grew up and packaging became a volume trash maker for everything bought from stores and shippers. More and more trash created as, just in time, alleys where considered important and trash disappeared from view - out of sight, out of mind.

I remember from my early years, about out site seeing, with dad driving us through a town and seeing very large piles of furniture stacked on the curb line for a house and I asked about why this was. Dad assured us that incidences like this had diminished greatly since the wrath of the Great Depression had about its run course in the late years of the 1930's. Evictions were life episodes, although diminishing, life lines were fragile, at best, and many ceased at the curb line. The Great World War changed the way Americans reacted to life. Curative, full employment, was a pill for social ills.

For Sale, For Lease, For Rent - signs became common place ; the curb line became more prominent as a function in the design of streets and, finally, assumed their rightful place in a borough's landscape.

My thoughts, though, bring me back to youthful feelings about the roll of curbs. Too often I squint faces into the piles of disposed furniture from evictions long forgotten. Will this happen again ? Will citizens be marginalized again from their inability to pay for housing or for basic healthcare ? Will the funnel remain reversed and draw all increased income from the American engine of production up, away from the producers, into the deepening pockets of our oligarchs ? 

Will curb lines up north become clogged with the destitute population as it has down here on the sun coast of Florida ? How will the old, the in firmed, the immobile be treated ? I know, I'll expire shortly, so don't cry for me, save your tears for those with few resources, who have to live life out there behind a tree. 

Ronald C. Downie 

Spanish Point

In coastal waters, early man sought food

Delivered by tides that rose and then fell ; 

Almost like a huge organism breathing, 

Unless upset, by storm induced fury.

Shellfish by the buckets, the earthen mounds 

Sing out loudly to our generations.

Facts needn't be expressed only on paper.

Unwittingly, "The Assent Of Man" strides.

Did sunsets enter into early life ?

Did early natives begin drum circles ?

Did they hollow out logs for their canoes ?

Life evolves, goes on, believing in self.  

Seeking answers from ancestors long gone.

Who lived their lives suppressing wants, while needs,

Pressed each day's hours seeking eatables.

Existing, they survive today by deeds 

Unaware of their affects left behind.

No Bible was written about them, then.

Inquisitive, modern man scales the walls 

Recording what he thinks about the past.

Ronald C. Downie

May Day, May Day, May Day !!!

Not lately, do I see colorful crepe 

Paper steamers twirling in sun warmed air, 

Hung from a tall flag pole, centered out front.

Music's a must, if not a radio, records. 

Through the magic of memory, many

Years disappear, seventy-five long ones. 

The golden time of youthful impression,

Elementary school, up there, top the  hill.

May First, May Day, somewhere begins summer,

Somewhere, end of winter. Pivotal day

In the scheme of seasons, not calendar. 

Hair combed, the girls interweave the streamers.

Grumbling, the boys reluctantly pitch in,

As teachers play conductor-director.

All look forward to that last bell, "School's Out".

Time, as a vine, withers as it's climbing.

Young impressionable days dissipate 

Into the far off zephyrs of heaven.

Lost, but to be resurrected for thee, 

By me, pulled from temporal recesses.

Ronald C. Downie

5/1/2017

Readers Wanted

I don't want to sound like a sniveling idiot by thinking what I've written over the last few decades is no longer relevant in today's environment. All words, whenever written, have weight to them equal to the mass of the thought used while writing. The problem arises when the reading public, very limited as it has been, gives little if any response to the effort, therefore, how do I calculate the weight of my words? Well, now that I'm living on the Sun Coast of Florida rather than in southeastern Pennsylvania, I will have to change my reading public. Maybe these sun worshippers will gravitate to my poetic words just because many are retired and closer to my age and their commitments for earnings to pay for life's responsibilities have been much lessened. 

Ronald C Downie

March Madness

March 2017 has come and gone and, what of importance, happened to me in those 31 days. "Good fences make good neighbors" from a Frost poem cropped up in my mind when I thought of writing this piece about my own "March Madness". 

Yes, there is a fence, part of the way, dividing daughter Lia and Marty's property from their neighbor to the east of them. Mark and his wife, Sharon, who are really good neighbors, helpful and friendly, social and caring. It is something Mark did for Connie and me that triggered my own personal "March Madness".

Writing hasn't left me, yet, though many known and unknown to me, I bet, wish it had. I am neither academic nor scholarly with my ventures at connecting words into phrases to make a point. Once I was a voracious reader. Pre-iPad I read every day both business wise and for enjoyment.  Today, I am as many, many also are, enslaved to the screen pad of their worldly instrument. We all spend an inordinate amount of time perusing Facebook, reading eMails, and in general surfing of the web. My enjoyment now is turning the TV to Music Choice - Light Classical - and lightly listen to music of the masters. 

Mark, the neighbor, dropped over and asked Connie and I how we were doing and in the conversation Connie said about books she was reading. In a split second Mark went back through the gate to his house and returned in a flash with three books : "On The Edge Of Survival" author, Spike Walker ;  "The Shack" author, Wm. Paul Young ; and "The Road" author, Cormac McCarthy. 

Connie started reading The Shack and I picked up Spike Walker's book because of Mark's recommendation : Mark's older brother, Matt, now a Rear Admiral in Washington, DC., was a principal character in the unfolding of Walker's gripping saga of survival. Matt Bell commanded the coast guard cutter assigned to try to off load the crew from a huge Chinese freighter floundering without power. Weather no one had ever seen so bad, waves at record heights, winds at hurricane force, and the dark of night so frightening ; all elements had to be ignored, had to be overcome. Spike Walker thrives on describing harrowing tails like few other writers can do. Jump ball for my March Madness started between three book covers.

Picking up "The Shack" after consuming a book of survival where every page grips a reader and won't let them go, may to some, be sort of a let down. It wasn't ! A modern day family living a normal life is crushed by an event seemingly unfathomable but what comes next defies all modern day thinking. If you have all your faiths wrapped up and folded away, "The Shack" is a must read for you.

Last read but not the least of books was "The Road". From a thrill a minute book, to spiritual testing beyond the norm in "The Shack", to "The Road", a book hard to describe. Now to be found in film theaters, "The Road", will take some acting to pull off the abject horror found in its pages. If this story is the eventual episode of mankind, heaven help us. Disappointment, disillusionment, and despair fill these pages in a way a reader never wants to put the book down. Odd this response, but true in my experience. 

The best March Madness I've had in many years of my 82 that I've been privy to. All made possible by the swift action of a neighbor who, "like a good neighbor", thinks of others as he would himself. Could this be the affect of living in Sorrento East ?

Ronald C. Downie

An Oligarch Here, an Oligarch There ..,

An Oligarch here, an Oligarch there, seems an Oligarch is everywhere. 

Watching C-Span 3 today : the Senate's hearing on Russia's influence on our just past presidential election : the word "Oligarch" was often used to describe filthy rich men, especially Russians, who seemed to be pulling strings in a way that swayed the election toward Donald Trump. 

Oligarchs are not the ones hitting the keys of computers but are the financial facilitators to hire individuals whose job is to tickle the keys. And tickle they did and, worst of all, they were very successful. Poison the news their mission, poison was their words, their words then became fake news.

Neither can I pronounce these Russians by name nor, heaven help me, spell their names correctly. I imagine I can do both with American Oligarchs since many are referred to every day because quite a few are cabinet members in our new government, the billionaires who were the captains of industry. 

Oligarchs seem to have few allegiances; they seem to worship the accumulation of huge sums of money most of all. They are those welcomed visitors to our president's palatial digs. Rarely in my life have so many billionaires congregated together in their effort to show us commoners why we're not one of them. 

Oligarchs in the past occupied the castles, owned the serfs, paid homage to the King, raped the earth, and when both land and people were spent, they turned to conquer a weaker neighbor. They may be more sophisticated these days but their allegiance to accumulating huge sums of money has never wavered. 

Today they're installed in Washington DC's  halls of power. Where are we ? "We the People" are void of power since we are without huge fortunes that seems to follow certain family lines. Being poor is similar to having some type of a plague, the type which debilitates us beyond our imagination. 

In medieval times, long past, oligarchs were finally unseated from power, king's feudal systems wained, the impoverished serfs rose up to form democratic governments based on "the rule of laws". But, just like a bad penny, the debunked old surfaces again to test "we the people"and see if we do have some resolve left in our bonnets. We must overcome the oligarchs whichever century they pop up in again.

Ronald C. Downie

Your Health Care

Wake up, people ! Single payer, Universal Health Care for every American, is the most effective way to pressure "Big Pharma" to price all prescription drugs at the lowest unit cost possible. Further, "Big Pharma" would also have to compete with drugs possibly coming from foreign countries. 

As I find in my own circumstances, drugs make up at least half of my costs for insurance coverage. Savings there are huge in overall premium costs figured to enhance your coverage for your health care insurance. Medicare for all is the proper path for Universal HealthCare coverage to take.

Those with vested interests in no change will want to pressure congress not to change how we in the USA provide for and pay for health care. Keep your eyes open to see how the professionals grease the palms of our representatives so they vote for the status quo. Professional lobbyists will swarm over the halls of our lawmakers like flies on a manure pile because there is just so much money awash in our present system. The problem exists, though, that this money goes into someone's pocket rather than insuring the public against disease and other medical problems.

Universal Health Care, "Medicare For All", is coming down the tracks. Hop on and finally give Americans what the rest of the industrialized has. 

Ronald C. Downie