I believe I will do a series of "I wonder what it's like" posts. Today I wonder what it's like to live someplace where you do not need to own a car .
Being from Michigan, hatched and brung up not all that far from Detroit, I know it's likely to get me deported if I suggest that there might be something more valuable, more important, more worth going in debt for, even more more romantic than your own wheels.
That's right, romantic. A TV car commercial says "You want romance? You want to fall in love? You'll just have to go drive one." Anderson Cooper's afternoon freak show, that's a lot like Dr. Phil's freak show, featured a guy who is literally in love with his car. He says he has a physical relationship with it. Don't ask. I don't want to know. If only Henry knew what he hath wrought.
Old Henry has been accused of everything from anti-Semitism to union busting but he did bring us good radio. He built Greenfield Village, brought us old time radio music from there and sponsored the Ford Sunday Evening Hour on the network. Plus that he helped Laurens Hammond bankroll the Hammond Organ and ordered one of the first models.
An instrument that changed music as much as Ford's Tin Lizzy changed the way we get from here to there.
Sorry, Henry. There are still times when I wish I didn't need to own one. I wonder what it's like to use a bus, train, taxi, boat, feet or what manner of conveyance folks outside of Michigan use to get where they need to go.
I wonder what it's like to have writers block. That won't happen to me, not when there are thousands of things to write about. Or is it millions. Maybe it's infinite, I don't know.
Or might it be that only great writers with big things to say get plugged up while I am full of trivia and other things that come popping out.
My writing challenge, and the most fun at the same time, is not what to say but how to say it. There are so many ways to write it and make it work for the medium you're writing for. I enjoy recycling an idea, making it right for each of the four local publications who accept my meanderings because it doesn't cost them anything. Correction: A township newspaper pays me a whopping cent and a half a word. I take the check for 5 or 6 bucks to the bank, convinced that I am a professional writer.
Some wiseguy who won't get credit because I don't remember who it was said we long to be praised for something other than what we are known for.
If once a week or so an old radio fan says he still misses me on the air, I give him my standard reply that needs a retread real bad. "Thanks. I miss me, too. but I don't want to be in radio the way it is today." That's a good opening for them to talk about how the once great radio medium has gone to hell.
But let one person say she reads my column in the senior magazine and likes it, and I glow like the dial of my 1941 Zenith Radio.
I already know how I will refurbish this one for that senior paper. I will yell at my fellow geezers and geezerettes that they should get on the internet so they can read the splendid blogs there. Especially mine.
