Archives for March 2025

Someone called me a whiz kid because I knew how to record a voice memo on an iPhone. He’s a few years older than me, but it got me thinking that if I qualify as a kid, maybe it was time to start to giving the “Kid” moniker to anyone younger than me.

The server at the Indian restaurant will be Kid Curry, the UPS driver will be Kid Brown, which means the other delivery guy will be Kid Fed. My coffee will be expertly brewed by Kid Barista and I’ll purchase my jeans from Kid Levi. Movie tickets will be purchased from Kid Flic and burgers from Kid Mac. Kid Firestone will rotate my tires and Kid Kroger will bag my groceries. Kid Cable will keep my TV going and with any luck, I’ll never have to watch any of the shameless shenanigans of Kid Kardashian.

When you’re a kid, you don’t want be called kid. As in, “Scram kid.” Or W. C. Field’s line, “Go away kid, ya bother me.” And being someone’s kid brother or kid sister isn’t exactly the description a young person wishes to be called.

But attitudes change and the years have mellowed my opinion about being “the kid.” Being the youngest carries no stigma anymore. On the contrary, when you put a bunch of boomers in a room, it’s quite the honor to be considered the kid.

It’s a storied tradition when you think about it. The Cisco Kid, Billy the Kid, Kid Shane, Karate Kid, Cudi the Kid, Kaitou Kid, Heartbreak Kid, Ringo Kid, Rawhide Kid, Two-Gun Kid, and who could forget the Sundance Kid. In the movie Casablanca, Rick toasts Ilsa with “Here’s looking at you kid.” That line is one of moviedom’s most famous.

A kid is young. A kid can get away with stuff. A kid has a certain joi de vivre, and who doesn’t want that? Yep, I’m liking this “kid” thing. I like being called kid, and I think I’m really going to enjoy calling younger people “kid.”

It’s a lot better than whippersnapper.

Jay Harrison is a writer and creative consultant for DesignConcept. His newest mystery novel, Rio Puerco Demise is available on Amazon. His first mystery novel, Head Above Water, is also available on Amazon. But that’s not all. You can also purchase the Best of BoomSpeak on Amazon.

Fat cars, skinny cars, cars are up on blocks, tough cars, sissy cars, even cars with rusty pox. We have a gathering of Oldsmobiles from all over the country at our convention center.

Oldsmobiles run in my family. My dad’s first car was a 1938 Oldsmobile coupe. (Back then in cou-pay.) He won it in a contest! I have the letter from the general manager of the Oldsmobile division announcing him as the winner. He picked the car up at a local dealership and I have a picture of that too.

From then on he bought only Oldsmobiles, a total of twelve. There was only one time he didn’t and that’s the year we took a camping trip from Michigan to the left coast. He wanted a station wagon, and Oldsmobile didn’t make a station wagon, so he bought a Dodge. As soon as that had the required mileage he traded and we were back on the Oldsmobile bandwagon.

I almost killed myself in an Oldsmobile. When I was in high school, Dad bought a sleeper. A sleeper is a car that looks mild on the outside, but runs wild. It was a 1963 Oldsmobile, two door hardtop, with a 394 cubic inch engine, but it only had a two barrel carburator. The result was great low end torque to get the car moving quickly. It didn’t have positraction rear end so only one rear wheel put the power to the ground.

On a hot day on asphalt, it would make a black line a 100 yards long. I would drag race it on Saturday night at Milan, MI. In those days the class to compete in was horsepower to weight ratio. I raced I/Stock Automatic. I won a very nice trophy one on of my trips. There are a few more stories connected with that I will save for later. The first is the hiding of the trophy and the second is getting busted by my dad for racing.

Back to almost getting killed. I wasn’t racing, I probably wasn’t even speeding because I was on my way to work. I probably was screwing around, because I smashed into a tree on a clear, dry afternoon. The left side of the car was mangled from front to my door. It crushed my left leg and cracked my noggin. I spent three months in the hospital in traction for the leg. Ninety days without getting out of bed!

Dad continued to buy Oldsmobiles until he died. He took great care of them, the last two or three had well over 150,000 miles. The last car he owned had over 150,000 miles and we donated it to a grandmother raising her grandchildren. Up in recently, I’ve seen it tooling around.

When I got married, our first car was an 1968 Oldsmobile Cutlass Convertible. Nice gift from my parents. Some idiot ran a stop sign and I broadsided him. The car never was the same. I wish I had it now.

They stopped making Oldsmobiles in 2004, but I won’t miss them, I have my memories.

Mark Van Patten wrote a blog called Going Like Sixty and has been married to the same woman since 1968. We’re trying to get him to write for us again by publishing his old essays. This one is from 2009 or 10 or who knows?

Sitting in the ER waiting room, entry form on my knee, I started down the hypochondriac wish-list. Took me a while to decide—I got this, and this, but not that. It was a catalog of ailments, actually, but with many afflictions strangely missing. For example, a very personal, early one…circumcision…first loss of body part without my consent. Ha! And from there, more predictable losses like teeth and additions like eyeglasses and immunizations for measles and mumps. Not to mention the occasional ankle sprain and odd fracture.

Okay, all to be expected in the course of growing up, I guess. But then the check list referenced particular system issues like iron deficiency, surgeries, heart irregularities. So many things to get, and not get, to survive and work-around over the years.

A little guy across from me, snuggling in his mother’s arms, began to crab and fuss. ‘Welcome to the club kid,’ I thought, ‘it’s a long road of attrition ahead. Good thing you can’t read this inventory of things to come.’

I dropped my forms at the nurse’s station and scanned the room as I turned. There was a scrunched up teenage girl hiding behind a People magazine. An old man, older than me, I bet, clenching his jaw, hoping for another ‘stay’. A grey-haired woman tapping her foot, waiting for a verdict.

Reminded me of a visit to Ireland and a mountaintop shrine to St. Patrick. I was part of the crowd of petitioners bowing over rented hiking sticks, struggling up the rocky, rutted road in search of a cure, a fix…a reprieve.

Is this waiting room another shrine, I asked myself, another place to join vulnerability with hope for healing? Am I on a medical pilgrimage for a sustaining cure? Nah, no big thing, this time, just a minor repair.

But it is like I’m in a church, in a way, in a congregation of needy faithful enduring pain and worry, praying for the miracles of medicine and technology to heal, to restore. So, church… but with no specific beliefs, no hymns, no communion, just the commonality of shared need for care and fix.

Amen.

Retired trainer, and writing instructor, Joe Novara lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Writings include novels, short stories, a memoir and various poems, plays, anthologies and articles. Read more at https://freefloatingstories.wordpress.com/

One of the two things that every kid did know about every person on our end of the block was whether they were a Chicago Cub fan or whether they had made at least one very bad choice in their lives and were a Chicago White Sox fan. Now, as the old saying goes, “some of my best friends” were White Sox fans. As far as I am concerned, this shows that we can overcome all our differences and there is hope for humanity. Given the depth of hatred between these groups, the fact that they could live and play together had a Romeo and Juliet nature about it, including the sad ending part (by that I don’t mean the poison stuff in Romeo and Juliet, I mean the sad end Cub fans had to live with every year in October).

The other thing every kid knew about every other kid’s parents was whether they were grass people or not. Really, the grass people identification was a lot more relevant than the Cub/Sox one. So, I don’t want to create any confusion—grass people didn’t smoke grass (I don’t think drugs had been invented yet, at least from our perspective). Grass people were those who worshiped their grass, regardless of their stated religious affiliations. In other words, I mean the “get off my lawn” group. While people could move back and forth between being grass people and not, it was rare. None of the serious grass people ever fell out of faith with their lawns, and those grassnostic people who occasionally converted during the dreamy spring planting frenzies would quickly fall off the grass wagon as summer came. Their apostasy was greeted with great joy by the block kids.

This knowledge of people’s grass affiliation was critical. Nearly every block activity, especially street softball and hide-and-go-seek, required some involvement of neighborhood front yards. While we tried to honor neighbors’ grass affiliations (we do believe in grass choice in this country), we did not always succeed. We would occasionally trample (literally) on a neighbor’s grass freedom. Now, in addition to being a potentially unconstitutional action on our part, this would also occasionally result in the confiscation of whatever ball had ventured onto their lawn, confiscation of your hula hoop, etc., or a call to your parents. That meant hearing from both the offended neighbor and your own parents the never-ending lecture on how there was a beautiful park just three blocks away where we could play. Adults!

Bob Marksteiner was born in Chicago and grew up in Franklin Park, Illinois