It's the kind of day that makes November infamous. Overcast and rainy and temps in the high 30s so life outside is just like standing in a refrigerator in the rain.
Tuesday night I drove up to Monaca, PA and the Beaver Valley Mall. It's an old mall, built in the early 1970s. I used to take high school dates there to eat, watch people and take in a movie at the Cineplex. Movies like Chinatown, The Sting, The Godfather, Being There. Real movies, not comic books on film.
Anyway, I was wandering the mall and I heard Carol King sing about how she felt the earth move under her feet and Eric Burdon and War tell the story of the Cisco Kid and how he was a friend of mine.
I realized that I had made it to the future, while surrounded by familiarity. Today's mall has cellular telephone company stores plying their trade. We had no such technology back in 1974. There were giant television screens advertising shiatsu massage therapy and tattoo parlors. The kids who are now in the roles of me and my high school girlfriends all had their necks bent toward the phone as they texted one another. We would simply speak without the aid of hand held, wireless telephony. I wonder what they are trying to say to one another?
I bought my brother the annual Lenox porcelain snowflake ornament for this year's Christmas tree. I have given him a Lenox porcelain snowflake each year for the past thirty years. I think he could pawn all those ornaments and buy himself a nice used car! Based on what the wide wide world of the interweb says, the replacement value of some of the ornaments can approach $400 or more.
I tried to buy my 2015 wall calendar for the kitchen, but the selection is still too sparse. On the other hand, three years ago I farted around until the week between Christmas and New Year's Day and could find calendars with kittens, professional wrestlers and the sketches of Thomas Kincaid and nothing else.
So my quest to document appointments in 2015 goes on, even as I found a way to go back to 1975.