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.

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.

To say goodbye

This past weekend I attended a service at the beautiful Trinity Episcopal Church in Ambler, PA, to say goodbye to a cousin of mine.  Andrea was an inspiration to everyone who met her, a selfless social worker who worked tirelessly on behalf of others, loved by her family of course but also beloved in her community and at her church.

The large sanctuary filled up with her friends and relatives mourning her passage, but sure she was in a peaceful place befitting her life's work.  Her son read a poem evocative of her life:

Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there. I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning's hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry;
I am not there. I did not die. 

Mary Elizabeth Frye

She was laid to rest in a quiet corner of the churchyard.  She will be greatly missed by all.

PeoplesBank Park

When I was in York last week, I took in a game at the PeoplesBank Park to see the York Revolution, an unaffiliated minor league baseball team take on the Sugar Land Skeeters.  The park was built in 2009 or thereabouts and is nestled in right between the river running through downtown and the railroad station.

I eschewed the "cheapest seat in the park," a so-called $10 "lawn seating" ticket out in the grass beyond the left field fence, for a $15 seat by third base under the shadow of the luxury boxes upstairs.  Combined with $3 for parking and a $2.50 hotdog (I brought my own water bottle in), it was a cheap outing to the ballpark.

After checking out my seat, I meandered around the park all game long and sat wherever I wanted.  It's a nice expansive ballpark, very underutilized as several food courts were shuttered, but it has a kids playground out by left field with a merry-go-round and its food offering are many and varied, from $11 hoagies to $5 jumbo dogs with funnel cakes, Italian ices, pizza, White Castle hamburgers and boardwalk fries in between.

The game was interesting, as minor league ballgames often are, with a 400 foot single smacked off the top of the tall wall in left field that caromed right back to the left fielder, many pitching changes, flamethrowers serving up 88 mph fastballs and best of all, the Revolution's costumed colonial mascot firing off a loud cannon in centerfield when a Rev player hit a homer run.  The decibel level inside the park, with its excellent speakers mounted everywhere, came to be annoying by the end of the game, with non-stop PA chatter, advertising ditties and between-innings breathlessly reported upon challenges on-field amongst randomly-selected spectators,  and I discovered that it was literally impossible to engage in a cell-phone conversation from anywhere inside the park.

Running into an old friend

I spent a little time in York, PA on the day after the Fourth of July, sightseeing.  York once was the capital of the United States; it is where the Articles of Incorporation were ratified.

Gettysburg is thirty miles to the west, and after the terrific, terrible battle there in 1863, 14,000 wounded Union soldiers were transported to York for their convalescence at a site now set aside as Penn Park.  The Soldiers and Sailors Monument commemorates this ground.

Further to the north is the Prospect Hill Cemetery where there is a ring of honor atop the hill, guarded by a Union sentinel, enclosing the heroes who died of their wounds suffered at the most famous battle in American history.  On this hill, along the main street which runs the entire length of this town, there is an honor station commemorating the several sons of York who have been lost in this century's wars, and here I came across an old friend of mine, Adam Dickmyer, a York native, with whom I used to run in the District occasionally.

Adam was lost to us in Afghanistan eight years ago, but he is honored still in his hometown.  He was an NCO in the honor guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and he resides there still, for eternity.