The way our schedule worked out I only had a couple of hours free but Manfred came to the boat and we had coffee in the lounge and compared notes. It was fun to actually meet one of the people I had previously only known electronically.

Manfred has a lot larger camera collection than mine but I brought along an American camera from the 1950s that I figured he wouldn’t have in his collection. About a week after we returned home I received a package from Vienna. In it was a camera made in the late 1930s–the only camera, according to Manfred, ever made in Bratislava, Slovakia, an earlier stop on our cruise. The “Futurit” camera is made almost entirely out of a material called Bakelite–which predates modern plastic. The Futurit was made pretty much for local consumption so I suspect I’m one of the only people in the U.S. who owns one. Thanks, Manfred, and I’ll always remember our “coffee break” in Vienna.

Futurit Camera made in Bratislava in late 1930s.

Parliment Building, Budapest

On past trips I had lugged along my fairly cumbersome Nikon DSLR but decided to travel lighter this time and took a Fuji F600EXR “point and shoot” camera. I don’t particularly like having to hold the camera up and peer at a small TV-type screen to compose a photo but I loved being able to carry the camera gear in a case about the size of two packs of cigarettes (I quit smoking four years ago).

I chose the Fuji camera because it has just about instant shutter response when you push the button. Many point and shoots take forever to focus and compute exposure and the moment has passed by the time they fire. The one problem I did have was the camera was so small that when shooting at extreme telephoto I sometimes had trouble holding it still enough and I got some fuzzy photos. If I had read the manual in advance I would have known how to avoid that problem. The camera also has the equivalent of a 24mm lens while most point and shoots only have a 35mm equivalent lens. In the narrow streets of old European cities the extra coverage is a big help.

Photos from the trip can be seen at:
Here

I got know Ron a little better when we joined the same Army National Guard unit. But we were in different platoons and our primary communication was exchanging pleasantries when we encountered each other during drills.

One night in 1967, shortly after we got married, Sara and I went to a Boise Pizza place one Saturday night. I spotted Ron and his wife, Sue, in a booth. So we sat together and started comparing notes. We discovered we had something in common—we all liked to play Pinochle.

During the next couple of years at least once a month we got together with Ron and Sue at our place or their’s to play cards. I grew to have a lot of respect for Ron. Compared to me he had some tough times while growing up. But he wasn’t afraid of hard work. Right out of high school he got a job delivering soft drinks to stores around the valley. It was a physically taxing job with long hours. But it also paid well—much better than what I made as a reporter.

Ron and Sue became our best friends. We even went to a wedding in Pocatello with them—riding in the back seat of their 1966 Camero. Unfortunately, 1966 Cameros don’t have anything that can legitimately be called a back seat. It was a long trip. We also went to the Owyhee Cattleman’s summer meeting at Silver City with them which was an unforgettable experience.

On the weekends when we weren’t doing something with Ron and Sue, Ron and I were in the desert shooting at imaginary Soviet tanks. One time we were part of a squad marking “duds” on the M79 grenade range. A dud is an explosive device that didn’t explode when it was supposed to.. Ron spotted a dud and decided to hit it with a board. I said that wasn’t a good idea. He said it was only a smoke grenade and couldn’t hurt anyone. The explosion didn’t hurt him. But he was bright green for several days because the dye in the smoke that the shell generated when it went off wouldn’t wash off.

Then one day we heard Ron and Sue were getting a divorce. That pretty much destroyed our relationship with them. We did stay in touch with Ron off and on for several years but it wasn’t the same. I don’t think we’ve ever been as close to another couple as we were to them.

Recently, Sara wonder whatever happened to Ron? Last night when we came home from the Canyon County Fair, there was a message on our answering machine. It was Ron. He said he had just decided to give us a call and what had transpired since we last saw him thirty years ago. I called him back.

His voice sounded a little different but every so often the Ron we knew was recognizable. He lives in Vancouver, Washington now. Like me, he recently retired. He said driving truck all over the Pacific Northwest for three decades probably contributed to him being overweight, having high blood pressure and diabetes. He said it probably had something to do with three failed marriage, too.

We spent about 40 minutes on the phone with Ron. Before hanging up we exchanged email addresses. He said he plans to be in the area visiting family in early September. He promised to come see us. It will be wonderful to see him.

I’m finding that the older I get, the more I cherish really special friends.

The ring did hold some memories. The guy named Fred sold us our rings. Most adults called him “Fritz.” I didn’t learn until years later that Fritz was working for Morrison Knudsen on Wake Island when World War II started. The Japanese captured Wake. Fritz and some other workers were shipped off to prison camps elsewhere and fought to stay alive until the war ended. The M.K. workers who were kept on Wake were forced to work on construction projects. When they were finished, the Japanese executed them. When Fritz talked about those days, he got tears in his eyes.

The ring also reminded me of the night outside a dance that was held in the Kuna Elementary School gym. Butch, one of my classmates, got in a fight with Ted, a Nampa guy, over a girl. It looked for a while like it might turn into a general brawl so I took my ring off and stashed it in my pocket. That was standard procedure because if you happened to hit something hard with the ring, it could bend enough so you couldn’t get it off your finger.

I didn’t get in a fight but somehow the ring fell out of my pocket. The next day, when I went back to look for it, I discovered it had been run over by a car. I sent it to the factory to get it recast and the broken stone replaced .

After graduation I took off the ring and put it away–except for the period when my wife-to-be wore it when we were dating. She wrapped string around the ring until it fit her finger, then coated the string with many layers of blue fingernail polish to make it look more presentable.

I was tempted to take highest of the four offers for the ring but decided to think on it for awhile. I was only a few blocks from a pawn shop run by Chuck, the husband of Trudy, one of my high school classmates. I was pretty sure Chuck didn’t buy gold but I decided to say hello while I was in the area.

During my visit, I mentioned to Chuck that I had been checking out how much my class ring might be worth. I told him where I had gone to get offers. He said I was wasting gas because there was one guy in town that paid considerable more that the others for gold.

The guy Chuck recommended offered me $15 more than the previous high offer for my ring. So I took the money. It wasn’t like I was going to miss the ring, as it had been locked up in a fireproof box for the past thirty years. Besides, the money just about covered the cost of a bed liner for my pickup.

There was a period in middle age when I was sentimental about items that reminded me of the days of my youth. Now I’m at the age where a pickup bed liner is more relevant than 45-year-old memories.

For several years we have used one of the electric toothbrushes that move the bristles back and forth upteen thousand times per second. The brush does an excellent job of cleaning one’s teeth. But it occurred to me that there is a price being paid for that cleaning efficiency. When I finished brushing my teeth I tracked down my mate, who had just finished vacuuming the living room.

“I just had an epiphany,” I said.

“I hope it didn’t injure you?” she said, as she put away the vacuum hose.

“Well,” I replied. “ I was brushing my teeth and it occurred to me that the electric toothbrush has a timer. You are supposed to brush your teeth for thirty seconds on the front top teeth, thirty seconds on the backside of the top teeth, thirty seconds on the bottom front teeth and thirty seconds on the backside of the lower teeth.”

“So?”

“Well,” I continued, “That means it takes two minutes to brush my teeth. And I do it twice a day. That means I spend four minutes each day brushing my teeth.

“That sounds right,” she said. “So, what’s your point?”

“Well, if I spend four minutes a day brushing my teeth, during a seven-day week I will spend a total of twenty-eight minutes brushing them. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll round that off to a half hour a week.

“I’m not sure where you are going with this,” she said.

“Well, where I’m going is that if I spend one-half hour each week brushing my teeth. That means every two weeks I spend an entire hour brushing my teeth.”

“Obviously.”

“And that means each month I spend TWO WHOLE HOURS brushing my teeth.

“Yes.”

“So, if you multiply the two hours each month by twelve months, it means that every year I spend twenty-four hours–an ENTIRE DAY, brushing my teeth. That’s 1/365th of a year!”

“Not really,” she said.” You rounded everything off.”

I pulled a hand calculator out of a drawer and started entering numbers.

“OK, I’ll multiply four minutes a day by 365 days. That’s totals 1,460 minutes. And if you divide that by sixty minutes you come up with. . . .AH HA! That comes out to 24.3 hours! It’s actually, more, not less! So I’m spending more than a day out of each year of my life, just brushing my teeth! And if you divide that by four, It means I spend more than six hours each year brushing my upper front teeth, more than six hours brushing the back of my upper teeth and six hours each on the front and back of my lower teeth. That’s a significant amount of my life to spend just brushing my teeth! What do you have to say about that?”

“I think,” she said, “that you really don’t have anything better to do with your time. So why worry about how long it takes to brush your teeth? ”

I think it would be less demoralizing if she would just smack me in the side of the head with a cast iron frying pan.

I told Grace that when I was her age, telephones were attached to the wall with a wire—you couldn’t carry it around with you. She looked at me as if she was trying to decide if Grandpa was telling a windy. That’s when I realized that, to the best of my knowledge, in her seven years there has never been a phone attached to the wall in her house.

When I was Gracie’s age there was one phone in the house and it was the property of the telephone company, If you moved, the phone stayed in the house. We were on a “party line” with probably a dozen neighbors. If you picked up the phone to make a call and heard someone talking, you had to hang up and wait for them to finish.

The first phone I remember didn’t even have a dial. You picked it up and a woman operator asked “Number please.” You told the operator the town and the number you wanted to call and she plugged your line into the line connected to the person you were calling. It was all done by hand. In some rural areas I don’t think you could make calls after a certain time in the evening because the operator went home.

In the 1950s long distance calls were complicated. Your local operator connected you to a long distance operator. You told the long distance operator the state, town and person you wanted to call. Then you hung up. The operator called you back after she made the connection. On a holiday, when the lines were busy, it could sometimes be a hour or more before the operator completed the call.

Today people have “unlimited roaming” on their cell phones or can get long distance calling cards with hundreds of minutes for a small amount of money. In the old days transcontinental calls—or calls to a neighboring state—were expensive. The only calls that weren’t long distance were the ones to your own community. About the only time my parents made or received long distance calls was on Christmas, Thanksgiving, or when there was a death in the family. Receiving a long distance call from out of state was an event worth mentioning to neighbors. Of course, some of them already knew about it because they had listened to all or part of the call on the party line.

Ma Bell started change in the late 1960s—just about the time we got married. Our first phone was a new “Trim Line” model. It was smaller than the standard phones and it was tan instead of black. That put us out on the leading edge of phone technology for those days. But the phone company still owned the phone.

A few years later, other companies who wanted a piece of the communication pie got the government to break up Ma Bell. All of a sudden you could get your own phone and take it with you if you moved. But it still took about twenty years to convince me that the change was good. There was something comforting about having an all powerful company that made all you phone decisions for you. It was probably the way a lot of the Communists felt when the Soviet Union dissolved and there was no longer a supreme authority around to control ever facet of their lives.

I have to admit I like being able to carry my phone around with me. But I wonder if there is an “app” I could download so a female voice would say “number please” whenever I want to make a call.

Exercise isn’t the only positive I get from the daily constitutional. Walking through the neighborhood has allowed me to meet just about every person who lives here. Many have been here as long as we have (twenty years) or longer. But now I have time to stop and say hello and find out what’s happening our little section of the world. And Asher has time for some perfunctory derriere smelling with many of the canine residents.

So, the other day we were midway through our walk. We were heading down a street that intersects with a major highway. When we reach that intersection, we reverse course and head back into the neighborhood.

Near the stop sign on the street, a pickup truck was stopped. The driver of the truck was standing beside it. The person had the door of the extended cab portion of the truck open and was leaning inside.

My first thought was the pickup driver might have had an accident of the type that I experienced back when I was a smoker. I rolled down the driver’s window just a crack to throw out a still smoldering cigarette butt. But the slipstream grabbed the cigarette, pushed it back though the crack in the window and deposited in on the cushion in the back seat. Such incidents caused the locking of brakes, the squealing of tires and a huge helping of profanity as I tried to bail out of the vehicle and get to the butt before it burned a hole in something.

Anyway, I was pondering what had caused the pickup to stop when the driver suddenly stepped away from the vehicle, partially turned and threw a beverage can across the street and into the ditch in front of a house. The driver’s back was to me and the person obviously wasn’t aware there was a witness to the deed.

The fact that the driver obviously had no respect for our neighborhood really tripped my trigger. As the person climbed back into the truck’s driver’s seat I picked up my pace to get close enough to get the license number. Unfortunately, I am awful at remembering such things. But when the truck continued to sit there as Asher and I drew near, I decided on another course of action.

I walked up by the driver’s window. The person inside, who appeared to be a middle-aged woman, turned and looked at me. I held up a hand in a “wait” sign. The woman rolled down her window part way.

“Hang on just a minute,” I told the woman. Asher and I walked across the road to the ditch. I retrieved the soda can—which was still full—and walked back to the truck.

“Here, you dropped this,” I said, holding the can out. The driver looked at me for a moment, then reached out and took the can.

“Thank you.” said the woman. I thought there might be a slight hint of sarcasm in her tone. But there wasn’t much else she could say. She rolled up her window, put the pickup in gear, pulled out onto the highway and drove away.

I looked down at Asher who was staring up at me with sort of a “what was that all about?” look. We turned around and headed back up the neighborhood street to finish our walk. And it was, if I do say so myself, one of the most satisfying strolls I have had.

I don’t FaceBook, MySpace, text or tweet. I am fortunate. I got my degree in social networking thirty years ago on Walt’s front porch.

It was a bright sunny morning. It was late July but sizable patches of snow were still visible on the Owyhee Mountain peaks overlooking the old mining town of Silver City. The extra snow meant Jordan Creek, which winds through the middle of town, was still a real creek, not just a trickle of water in a rocky streambed. The creek gurgled past the west end of Walt Adams’ porch.

Walt was born in another nearby mining camp called Delamar. Delamar was long gone but Walt, at age 83, was doing just fine.

Walt was exercising an old rocking chair and sharing the benefits of the porch with several other sitters.

As caretaker of the Silver City Museum, Walt met just about every stranger who wandered into town.

“One day a fat lady showed up,” Walt recalled. “As she climbed the museum stairs, I could hear her complaining. She complained about how bad the roads were. She complained about having to walk up and down the hills in town and she complained about having to climb the stairs to get to the museum. When she got to the top she saw the sign that says it costs fifty cents to see the museum.”

“I’ve gone through all of this and now you’re going to charge me fifty cents to see the museum?” the fat lady complained to the caretaker.

“Lady, if I had known you were going to have so much to complain about I would have gladly paid you fifty cents not to come at all,” Walt replied.

Walt’s listeners were still chuckling about the fat lady when a dark blue Lincoln Continental with out?of?state plates rolled to a stop in front of the porch. The passengers peered out at the porch sitters while Dave, a local resident, talked to the driver. The car moved on. The sitters talked about how the road to Silver City wasn’t designed for low?slung Lincolns.

Dave came back to the porch. He said the people in the car were heading to Tillamook, Oregon, 500 miles further west. They thought the dirt road through Silver City was a shortcut. This generated several more stories from members of the group about city folks who had discovered the Silver City road was not a shortcut to anywhere.

The sitters watched the protective shadow cast by the porch roof shorten as the sun attempted to find a way to reach them. As they watched the shadow, Walt talked about growing up in the mountains, about people and events in a time span covering three quarters of a century. The time passed swiftly.

Soon it was time to abandon the porch to the midday sun. The retreat was only temporary. The people who built the porch 120 years earlier knew what they were doing. By midafternoon the porch would be back in the shadows and Walt and the other members of his communications class would be able to reclaim their seats.

The porch and Walt had both held up well over the years. Walt kept the porch in good repair and the porch had returned the favor by protecting Walt from the elements, while providing a place for reflection and good conversation.

The world might have fewer problems if there was less texting and tweeting and more front porches.