Today’s guest post comes from Jim in Clark’s Grove.

Willie was a classmate of mine at Austin Blair Elementary School in Jackson, Michigan. This school was located in an almost completely white working class neighborhood. Willie was one of a very small number of black kids that attended this school when I was enrolled there in the late forties and early fifties. He was not one of the neighborhood kids that I played with regularly. We did spend some time together in school and also after school. I remember one occasion when I went to his house and was surprised to see that there were beds used for sleeping in most of the rooms, including the kitchen. I guess it was a small house and there wasn’t enough bedrooms for everyone who lived there.

Willie and I were two of the tallest boys in our class. We decided we should work on developing our basketball skills. This included practicing shooting free throws together as well as getting help from a teacher on our shooting skills. I was a good student. Willie had trouble with his studies. I remember thinking that he was being treated as if he wasn’t very smart, but that wasn’t true. It seemed to me that he might have been able to do better in school if he had not been looked upon as someone who wasn’t capable of doing the work.

Racism was not a widely discussed topic in the late forties and early fifties. I had some sense that Willie was a victim of racial prejudice because of the way he was treated in school. I also recall a situation out side of school where racism came into play. Willie asked me if he could be my guest at the church I attended. I asked my parents if Willie could go to church with us. They didn’t seem to be in favor of this and said very little about it. There were no black members in our church and it was a church that many of the people from the best part of town attended. I think both my parents and I would have felt very uncomfortable taking Willie to church with us as a guest.

I let Willie’s request drop without telling him anything.

I don’t remember going to junior high with Willie. I think he went to the junior high in the center of town and I went to the one on the east side. I moved away from Jackson for two years before returning to attend Jackson High during my last two years of high school. It was a large high school and the only class that I think I had with Willie was gym class. One day in gym class Willie and I teamed up to beat another team of basketball players that included a member of the varsity team and some of his friends. Willie and I were not candidates for the varsity team, but we gave those guys a surprise on that day.

I have one last memory of Willie regarding something that happened during preparations for graduation. We were dressed in suit coats and ties. Willie noticed that the way he did his tie was different from the way I did mine. I did up my tie with a plain looking knot that I had learned from my Dad. Willie helped me undo my tie and tie it up again with the more elegant Windsor knot that he used.

Willie and I went our separate ways after graduation. I don’t know what became of him. I do very much appreciate having had the opportunity to become acquainted with him during my years in grade school and high school.

If you could re-connect with an old friend, who would it be and why?

Today’s guest post comes from Clyde.

Twenty years ago (Can it be 20 years?) when my partner and I started working together, we got into a fun argument about how to find a spot in parking lots.

The Clyde Method: find the first empty spot that looks about as close to the door as you are likely to get.

The John Method: drive around to find a spot as close as possible to the entrance.

Do you use the Clyde Method or the John Method for parking?

Our debate was over which of us had a more efficient method, which of us wasted more time: my longer walk or his longer drive. After three of four years of this, I was driving across Massachusetts, the eastern half of which is a full parking lot, when I heard WGBH public radio doing a report right to the heart of the matter. A graduate student in math at MIT was looking for a thesis project. He and his wife had the exact same difference in their parking methods and same debate. He developed a sound method for measuring it and found a mathematically-sound answer to the question. As it happens his model has applications for measuring and improving traffic flow and parking.

Wonder what his study found? I’ll tell you at the end of the day—maybe.

Today my parking quandaries are focused more on handicapped parking. My wife has a tag, which is in its way more of a problem than a solution. It was wonderful when we went to visit our son in California, and maybe now when we go to Seattle. Before we had the tag, we were with him in San Diego years ago visiting all the wonderful sights of that city, all with huge parking lots, when he declared that his parents were at that awkward in-between stage, old and slow moving but not yet old enough for a handicapped parking tag.

My problems with handicapped parking are fourfold, all exacerbated by my bad back which makes it impossible for me to turn my head very far:

1. Handicapped parking is always at the busiest place in the parking lot, right by the entrance with heavy foot and vehicle traffic.
2. Handicapped spots almost always require you to back out; they have that post with the blue sign at the front of them.
3. Many of the other people who park in those spots simply should not be driving anymore. So you have to be ready to dodge them.
4. Many of those who park in the spots have large vehicles, some because they are wheelchair vans, but many are just large vehicles.

A neighbor of mine says that at the local car dealership where he works the most popular sale is for extended cab full-size pickups, often to those with handicapped parking rights. Because I drive a small Scion black box, I frequently have to back out blind into unseen busy foot and vehicular traffic. Scary.

I have a problem leaving parking spots almost anywhere in a busy lot because of the tunnel vision caused by so many Intimida-look-alikes, many of them in the winter with snow plows. I usually drop my wife and her walker at the door and then park far out in the lot with my car facing out. Sometimes my waif of a car still ends up hidden between two bullies.

There is another problem with handicapped parking only a few places have solved, which does not effect us. The cart corrals are out in the middle of the parking lot. So what is then the benefit of the handicapped parking? Some people just leave the cart right there, and it often rolls into a parking spot, blocking it from the next handicapped driver to come along. I have seen some non-handicapped people just leave their unloaded cart in an empty handicapped spot. Two new large busy parking lots have been built here, neither of which provided a cart corral by the handicapped parking. As usual in America it is the appearance of things that matters more than the actual results.

But I have a moral question for you to solve for me. You would be surprised how often this occurs. Some parking lots have very large numbers of handicapped parking spots, often many sitting unused on a busy day. I pull into a busy parking lot with several handicapped spots available. However, also right by those spots is a non-blue spot.

Which should I take?
To which community, the handicapped or the non-handicapped, should I try to be fair?

Today’s guest post comes from Anna.

Time.

We never seem to have enough of it and it goes by too quickly. There aren’t enough hours in the day, days in the week, months in the year. Pick your favorite saw or cliché about time, and insert it .

A few weeks back I found myself doing something I never thought possible – creating time. This year’s election had me fired up enough that I felt I had to put my ideals into actions, time or no time. I knew this would mean giving my precious time as a gift in the hopes that I could defeat my foe. I found an organization working for the same goal and signed up for volunteer shifts. The shifts were three hours each – a large chunk out of anyone’s day, given the pulls and pushes of modern life. After working a few shifts I cajoled the staff into finding tasks I could do from home a little each day instead of going into the office for a scheduled shift. I could find an hour or so each day much more easily than 3 hours at a crack once a week; it became even easier when I found I could break that hour out into 2 or 3 smaller chunks of time in my day.

One evening, as I was doing my volunteer tasks, Husband told me about an article he was reading regarding our investment, as a culture, in being busy. We have created the construct of “not enough time” as a thing oddly valued and being “busy” as a status symbol (both tied to our need to feel “important”). The article went on to talk about ways to break out of the “too busy” trap. Along with just plain-old not over-scheduling or creating “busy-ness,” the article encouraged you to think in smaller increments of time for activities which can be slid into your day more easily.

Well shoot, that’s what I had done all on my own. With a bit of chronological alchemy, I created time.

Having thrown of the Shackles of Busy-ness, I propose the following Declaration of Time Independence:

When in the Course of Human Events, it becomes necessary for One People to dissolve the Chronological Bands which have connected them with another, and to Assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal hours to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s Clock entitle them, a Decent Respect to the Schedules of Mankind requires that they should declare the Time Allowances which impel them to Disengagement.

We hold these chronologies to be time-evident, that all days are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable increments, that among these are Quiescence, Calmness and the pursuit of Laziness.

That to secure these breathers, clocks are ignored among People, deriving their just hours from the consent of the scheduled, That whenever any Form of Time becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Schedules, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its appointments in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Idleness and Happiness. Leisure, indeed, will dictate that Agendas long established should well be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to Schedule, while Calendars are Sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the timetables to which they are accustomed. But when a long day of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Busy-ness evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Over-Schedule-ism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Agenda, and to provide new Calendars for their future tranquility.

What might you declare your independence from, if you could?

Today’s guest post comes from Clyde.

I have hit on a sure-fail marketing scheme, without even participating in a meeting that never ends, well, except for the one in my mind.

I am going to market a set of CD’s called “Sounds to Edit By.” It would hold the following discs, all of which I must confess I own and find perfect for editing:

• One hour of falling rain with thunder in the distant background.
• Haydn Symphony 101, “The Clock”
• “Inner Voices” by R. Carlos Nakai (Navaho flute music)
• Haydn Symphony 94, “The Surprise” (I keep missing the surprise)
• Gregorian Chant
• “In Concert: Credence Clearwater Revival.” (This is to clear the palette.)
• Plainsong Chant
• “Enya” (I borrow it from Sandy) (No, really; it’s hers, not mine; really.)
• “Canyon Consort” by Paul Winter
• One hour of ocean waves

I realize that my potential audience is small, maybe just me and Robin, Bonnie L., and an astounding number of my former students who are editors and writers of various forms.
But who would have thought there was such a large consumer base for high-priced coffee that, to me, tastes much like battery acid! Or that people would buy bottles of water at 10,000 times the cost of a glass from their tap! Or that karaoke would still be slowly lingering to its eagerly anticipated death! So maybe my idea would work. A post script: I would add to my box set one last CD I don’t own containing only “Amazing Grace” played on bagpipes.

Browsing pointlessly in our pointless public library yesterday, I spotted a book title that jumped out at me: “Florida for Dummies.” Go ahead, write your own punchline.

But there was a success I would have never foreseen, the Dummy Books. Do they hold meetings trying to analyze their potential audience:

• “Someone who listens to Limbaugh?”
• “Well, no, not that dumb; has to be able to read.”
• “Voted for Sarah Palin?’
• “And watches ‘Dancing wit the Star’.”
• “And is a NASCAR fan.”
• “A Cubs fan for sure.”
• “No, a Yankees fan.”

Maybe they just envision Homer Simpson and Jessica Simpson.

But more power to them; not that we English teachers would ever approve of writing concisely and precisely, using graphic elements effectively. I have used a couple of the books, maybe three or four, to quickly overview a topic. I thought of some I could write:

• “Intelligence for Dummies.” But on which end of the spectrum am I an expert?
• “Editting for Dummys”
• “Left-Handedness for Dummies,” meaning for right-handed people.
• “Baboons for Dummies”
• “Lefse and Cardboard for Dummies” (How to distinguish between them)
• “Living with Germans for Dummies” (And who else would?)
• “Michele Bachmann for Michele Bachmann”

What Dummies book do you need?
What Dummies book would you write?