Thank you for a GREAT summer!

I heard myself complaining about my BUSY summer lately. My apologies. It has been a GREAT Summer for connecting, re-connecting and socializing with family, friends and acquaintances. And for those of us in the Northeast, the weather has been agreeable, albeit slightly hot and humid, but more than tolerable compared to the devastating drought they are experiencing in the mid-west and west. If you are someone who I have been in touch with through some summer event...Thank you for your contribution to my summer experience! And don't be surprised if you find yourself incorporated into some future blogpost as I weigh my thoughts and options in the future. My point in this post is simply to make the connection between experience and memory. I had the opportunity this summer to reconnect with family members and friends, some of which I had not see in years. In fact, forty-five years in the case of my classmates at a recent class reunion. If you haven't been to a class reunion, I urge you to go. You will be surprised at how people have changed, not just physically, but socially. If you had classmates that were not exactly your peers during the high school or college years, you will find them all equally excited to see you regardless of whatever socio-economic or cultural differences you may have had in school. It really was great fun to compare notes on where we've been, the connections we now share that may have developed in the interim as well as new pursuits we may now share. Just getting together conjures up memories of what you once shared, if not equally at the time, then collectively for having been there in the same time. One classmate related his experiences at the local candy store and drugstore fountain, neither of which are there any more. Although we may not have been there under similar circumstances or times, we shared the experience of the people who populated those businesses and we all remember the unique circumstances of going there. The little old lady, who sat by the candy window, and watched as you filled a small bag with penny candy and then watched equally intent as you counted out your pennies into her hand. At the drugstore, we all got our cokes or ice cream from the same group of ladies that always seem to know more about us and our families than we could ever understand. When Hillary says it takes a village to raise a child, she could easily been talking about our town in the 1960s. You couldn't take the "wrong" kind of book out of the library, for fear the librarian might call your parents. You couldn't misbehave at the drugstore or the candy store for the same reasons. While we may have thought we were simply anonymous as we paraded from business to business "downtown", there was always someone who knew us and what we should or shouldn't be doing. After more than 40 years, that's part of history, local history and your personal history. I urge you to "write it down" now while you're thinking about it. Maybe you can share it at your class reunion, or on your Facebook page with your new and old friends, or simply with your children or grandchildren who may be convinced you had a boring childhood. I know without asking you had an interesting childhood, whether you related one experience or many. We all did and they are all worth writing down for local history and personal history, and there are many formats to do so...here as a blogpost, on Facebook, on your town's history pages, in an historical society newsletter or maybe a special connection with your local newspaper. You can also write yourself, your children or grandchildren a letter to share now or in the future, to convey part of who you are, and the chidhood that made you who you are today, and perhaps some of the values you hope you transferred to your offspring. Soon, I'll get back to writing more of my experiences, back to a couple of memoir book projects of my and others experiences. I RETIRE in September...finally it's my time to remember and Write... I hope you'll have time to do the same.