Food on my summer trip

After I visited the 9/11 Memorial near Shanksville in western Pennsylvania, I had lunch at a hotdog restaurant, Hot Dog Shoppe Brighton, on a local highway north of Pittsburgh in Mars that was fabulous.  Inside as I was waiting for my order, I encountered a man waiting for a pickup order who was visiting his gravely ill brother in a hospital in Pittsburgh who asked him, as a last favor in his short time left, to bring him two hotdogs from this very restaurant when he came.

I had the loaded dog (chili, cheese and diced onions for about $1.69 each), which I consumed in my car without creating a mess because it was assembled so well in addition to being so good.  Then, satiated, I drove to Columbus where I stayed for a couple of days at my sister's house.

My sister and I went out the next day for lunch at a great barbecue restaurant, City Barbeque in Arlington, where I had as good a pulled pork sandwich as I have ever had.  The baked beans weren't bad either.

I think my sister liked her sandwich as well.  Her husband is an OSU professor who did deep research on burnt ends barbecue in Columbus and came up with this restaurant s being the best, which he subsequently and often confirmed by in-person trials.

What I did during my summer vacation

I toured the South by car during July, getting out of town over the July 4th week rather that watch the spectacle of our president bringing tanks onto the Mall to shore up his lilliputian affect.  In August I toured the midwest by car for a few days.

In western Pennsylvania I drove by a beer distributorship on a back road that just begged me to come on in.  It was a time machine that transported me back to the decade when I was an adolescent standing in line at the corner candy store, buying sugar daddies and Mad Magazines, and the next decade when I was making midnight runs to the supermarket to lay in a six-pack of beer for the late movies on TV, which, when they ended, the station played the national anthem and then went to a hissing snow field for the rest of the wee hours of the morning.

This place had the register alcove stacked with bubble gum cigars, candy cigarette packs, boston baked beans and best of all, those tiny wax bottles of colored fruit nectar that you would bite off the top and drain the 1 ounce of syrupy colored sugar water for refreshment on hot summer days.  But they also had beer in that vast warehouse space, brands that I knew well as a young man in New York where the drinking age was 18 then and that I hadn't seen in decades since then.

Schaeffer, Schmidt, Knickerbocker, Rheingold and Schlitz.  I happily laid in a case of Schmidt and thought that perhaps I would come back next year and maybe they would have Ballentine and Valley Forge beer.

Ruminations of a sad man

We moved into 42 Boulevard in Westerleigh, Staten Island, NY in 1964 where in the attic of this 3-story house, left behind by the former owners, was a treasure trove of American history, which I as a 12-year-old happily delved into.  Many an idle hour was spent by me in that dusty old attic going through boxes there. 

Jim Lovett was a WWI vet who had left behind his experience Over There in those boxes (maybe he was dead by then and nobody in his family thought there was anything of value in those boxes of books and clothes).  There were several WWI battle books, all with brittle pages that crumbled as I turned the pages through acid leaching, because then paper was processed with no regard to posterity. I remember one title called Cannoneers Have Hairy Ears, and several books on WWI arial combat.  

I also secured a campaign DI hat, and a German sawtooth 18 inch bayonet in a sheath that was straight out of Erich Remarque's All Quiet On The Western Front.  I had that bayonet, truly a war trophy, till I gave it to my middle child, Johnny, when he was 12. because he was the most like me in growing up, fascinated by the wartime experiences of men at arms.

Don't you know that the German bayonet commanded center-stage in a hearing in my quarter million dollar divorce from my, in my opinion, covert narcissistic wife because their point was that this showed how unfit I was to be a father.  After almost twenty years of not seeing any of my children through the extrajudicial but real process of Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS), this post reflects on my middle child Johnny, a most somber and sober child who would have turned his parents in to the Gestapo if they were reading banned books.

The Flight 93 Memorial

About twenty minutes north of the Pennsylvania Turnpike west of the Allegheny Tunnel, exit 110, is the rural field where United Flight 93 crashed at maximum speed on September 11, 2001 and disintegrated in a huge fireball of thousands of gallons of jet fuel, vaporizing all persons on board.  Up until that moment, a life and death struggle had been going on for many long minutes inside that plane as the heroic crew and passengers battled four murderous terrorists locked in the cockpit for control of the plane.

By forcing the plane to crash, the heroes aboard the plane lost their lives but won a bigger stake, causing the destruction of the flying missile before it could crash into the Capitol in DC, its intended target.  There was no air cover over Washington at the time, as the two jets scrambled, the only at-the-ready airiel defense for the entire east coast, were streaking east over the Atlantic looking for incoming Russians, their presumed enemies in the confusion of the moment.

The Flight 93 National Memorial at the tragic field is a somber and subdued place where the Visitor Center, set atop the last low ridge the screaming jet passed over before it burrowed into the field beyond, has an overlook that looks upon the field below where the impact crater was before it was filled in at the conclusion of the forensic investigation of the ground surrounding it.  A low retaining wall skirts the actual field, which still contains human remains too small to recover so it is considered to be a cemetery filled with heroes, and is off-limits for all visitors except for the family members of the victims of Flight 93, every September 11th.

The Visitor Center has displays explaining the day as it unfolded, tape recordings of doomed passengers calls from the plane to their loved ones, artifacts recovered from the field and gear worn by the heroic first responders who rushed in to try to salvage the unsalvageable.  The memorial is a sad but peaceful place, well worth a visit.

Summer's gone

Summer's almost gone.  On my run yesterday I passed by the local high school just as school was letting out and I watched all the students walking down the street excitedly talking amongst themselves, catching up after the long, hot summer.  Wistfully I thought about the long holiday weekend just past, about how the passage of Labor Day signifies the traditional end of summer and return to school for students, and how I had lunch at noon on Labor Day at the Lost Dog Pizzeria as is my won't on holidays.

On that Monday several days ago, I took a seat at a table by the window where I could see people entering and leaving the restaurant.  After I ordered an Italian Pie and a draft, I walked around the restaurant to see if I recognized anybody in the establishment beyond the wait staff but I did not.

The pizza pie arrived, a savory medley of ham, pepperoni, onion and genoa salami in a savory tomato pizza sauce.  Over the next half hour, I consumed two of the eight pieces of pizza and drank half my draft, left the rest as a talisman for the future, paid my fare and departed.  I hadn't seen anyone I thought I might know during that time.

Summer's almost gone.  Former family is gone.