Archives for April 2025

I’ve never seen a circus sideshow except in movies. I’ve read about them in books. But not real ones. I get the idea however…freak shows, hairy ladies, congenital twins and the like for folks who lived constrained and tedious lives. There definitely was a market for idle curiosity in the plain beige existence of middle America.

Well, all that has changed. Television takes us around the world. Movies expand our awareness of cultures and places otherwise unseen. But there is one medium that somehow feels like the offspring of the circus sideshow – the internet, specifically Google. We don’t need to wait for the circus to come to town. It comes to us, fits in our hand and updates daily with short visual clips of worldwide phenomena. How enlightening and helpful to the ACDC syndrome in all of us. And if not exactly that, some of the visual slots if not sporadic and unrelated can actually be thought informational, although I would hate to take a test on what I had just spent a half hour perusing online.

The subjects run to: felling trees, catching fish, wild animals, daring stunts, jokes and cartoons, woodworking, gags and gaffs. The variety of themes far outreaches a circus sideshow. But it changes so often in such short intervals that somehow it can feel like you’re attending class with a clever and animated teacher: This is fun. That is interesting. Look at the food, the life style, the clothes.

It amounts to curiosity candy with a few news fillers to justify the side trip down novelty lane. The distraction on a hand-held device may be justified because of the scope—international awareness, do-it-yourself hints, fitness suggestions, recipes. Not to mention sports, jokes, and travelogues. An hour of online scanning can feel like a semester in a college class broken into fascinating bits rather than a three month long, in-depth research of a specific topic like marital customs in Elizabethan literature.

This breeze through new, ever changing topics is interesting, exciting and engaging with no research papers or tests to weigh it down. Think college light. Exposure and learning at the tap of an icon. Too bad there isn’t a way to get a degree in internet exposure.

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/

A moment seared in my adolescent baby boomer brain. I was walking upstairs for algebra class. As usual, I passed Marsha on the way. She was “bad,” and getting “badder” fast. That day she appeared with a skirt above the knee — the first girl in my high school that dared to cross the Rubicon.

The baby boomer generation sexual revolution of the 1960s began in the bursting-at-the-modesty 1950s. The female knee became the symbol of pop culture risque.

Approaching the image from below enhanced the effect. She wore a thin white silk blouse collar up — hood style, the top two buttons undone, no bra. I could see the outline of her nipples. And she had bleached the pony tail on her jet black hair blond. As usual, her eyes looked like a hungry fox. She sported a new, very bright red on her pouting lips. A “baby” boomer Lolita before Lolita. Her attitude was classic bitchy: detached, you can’t have me, but maybe if you’re the quarterback, and beg.

The guy ahead of me stumbled at the sight and I bumped into him, causing a chain reaction of rear-enders and flying books. She strolled right by the chaos, smirking like a rock princess.

Marsha ended up having an affair with a geography teacher. The joke going around was that he showed her places she’d never been before. She got pregnant, he got fired. The femme fatale dropped out of school, worked as a waitress, then settled down with a truck driver for the local Caterpillar factory. I recognized Marsha at my class reunion twenty years later only after a classmate pointed her out. Alcohol, four children and sixty pounds had changed her appearance, but she still had the shortest skirt in the room. She seemed happy.

Terry Hamburg blogged about the exciting and revolutionary baby boomer years and wrote this circa 2009. It’s part of our Oldies But Goodies Best of BoomSpeak collection.

In the early sixties, getting off the bus every day, the neighborhood kids changed out of school clothes to head up to the park where we worked on our water project. We propped open the bubbler water fountain with a forked stick. The water flowed down into lakes and canals behind dams of bricks, stones, and clay. We built, dug, rebuilt, and re-dug to expand the project down into the gulley. We got muddy and happy every day after school. One late spring day, two men drove up in a red panel truck with Municipal Utilities printed on the door. The driver, in khaki pants and gray jacket, put the propping stick in his pocket. The younger guy, in blue jeans and plaid shirt, pulled out a wrench and removed the fountain bubbler, then screwed a silver cap onto the pipe. They drove off without a word to us silently watching and some were crying. In those days, children didn’t challenge adults; the adults didn’t think they needed to explain themselves to kids.

Most families in the neighborhood lived paycheck to paycheck and some feared eviction. A mother left one night for her shift at the Rawlings plant and never returned; her daughter designed the layout of the water project and each expansion. A father laid off from the iron mines got drunk every night and would beat his wife; his son dug the canals deeper than anybody. One boy lost family members in a collision with a delivery truck on the highway; he figured out how to make a lock and dam work for toy boats. The kid next door could not play sports because he had heart problems from rheumatic fever; he monitored water flow and pulled leaves from the canals.

With all that going on in the neighborhood and more, the water project in the park had been our refuge, the one thing we constantly talked about and looked forward to doing every day, more so than anything else like riding bikes or playing football.

I drove by the old neighborhood after my mom’s funeral 60 years later. That water pipe is standing there at the top of the park and silver-capped just as it was that late spring day. Of course, all the kids are gone from that time, grown and moved away. Some did become civil engineers and construction managers; I became a psychologist.

Michael C. Roberts is a mostly retired pediatric psychologist. He now hikes in the Sonoran Desert with his dog, cleverly named “Buddy.” He tried painting inspirational rocks during the pandemic, but he cannot paint with any artistry, so maybe they were not very inspirational. He returned to photography. Several of his photographs have been published in literary magazines and on journal covers. A book is available on Amazon: “Imaging the World with Plastic Cameras: Diana and Holga.”