End of an Era?

Rachel's Facebook status recently was "Tragus time. Ahhhhhhh...." I had no idea what she was referring to until I got a text from her with a photo saying "LOOK AT MY EAR!!!!!!!"  I liked it but Tammy didn't appear to share in her excitement. I think it was simply her motherly default mode kicking in as she poo-pooed Rachel for having it done. But truth be told, I think she was actually suppressing thoughts of liking it.

She'll be 20 next month so there isn't much we can say about these sorts of things. Plus, she used her own money from her job at the flower shop. Had it been a piercing that left a gaping hole in her earlobe I'm quite sure we'd have had more to say.

Lakeville's Pan-o-Prog (Panorama of Progress) is over for another year. As usual, we made it into town Friday night for Cruise Night. It's always a good time. The show kicked off with a fly-over by Miss Mitchell, a WW2 B25 bomber. (That experience seems very tempting to me and although the $400 price won't get you a round-trip ticket to either coast it still seems reasonable)

It's impossible to spend any amount of time at Cruise Night and not run into neighbors or people from work. We bumped into Mark and Becky (from across the street and also from work) and spent most of our time chatting with them. It became apparent early on that Mark knows a whole lot more about vintage cars that I ever will.

Cruise Night video

I was online yesterday morning trying to score some tickets to see Adele later next month. They went on sale at 10:00 so I was signed in several minutes ahead of time with hopes of actually getting something decent. My best guess is that it was a sold-out show by 10:00:01. I was too slow.

I figured demand would be high but I had no idea it was this high. Good for her but bad for me and I'm guessing a whole lot of others.

The space shuttle program is in its final run now as the last of its shuttles orbits the earth. Space exploration has been going on my entire life but it's not the same as it once was. It used to be that I and most everyone else would stop what we were doing to observe a liftoff or reentry.  I remember being in elementary and junior high school during the Apollo missions and how we'd all gather in the auditorium with eyes riveted to the too-small TV monitors set up in front. I don't think anybody had to tell us to be quiet; we were all so fascinated by it.

One of my earliest memories is of being a young boy and looking up into the night sky with my parents as we searched for and eventually saw the satellite Sputnik pass by. Not many years later on a July night in 1969, we would all gather around the TV set at my aunt and uncle's home in Michigan's Upper Peninsula to watch as we put the first man on the moon. I remember peering through their living room window later that night, looking at the moon and being lost in wonder at the thought of people actually being up there.

But somewhere along the way, and I'm ashamed to admit this, space exploration became somewhat ho-hum to I think most of us and it shouldn't have. Maybe it's because the missions became less about exploring and more about routine maintenance to the space station or Hubble telescope. Still, we were putting people into outer-space and there's never anything routine about that.

People will sometimes ask who your heroes were when you were growing up and I'm always at a loss to think of any. I just never looked up to people that way. But in the short time I've spent writing this blog piece, I realize that maybe I really did have some heroes but just never knew it until now.


Comments

John A Hill said…
The day my daughter turned 18, she went directly from school to work and then to the tattoo/piercing place to have her navel pierced. She'll be 20 in a couple of months and now has a total of 10 piercings: two in each ear lobe, one high on each ear, a tragus in one ear and an antitragus in the other, an anti-Monroe (lower lip) and the navel piercing.

All in all, I guess you pick your battles. So far this hasn't been one of them!
Kevin Gilmore said…
Haha...John...that's 10 piercings that you know of! I think they're somewhat addictive...sort of like tattoos maybe.
Rachel said…
i wouldnt mind getting a piercing or 2 more. I need to balance out the tragus with something on the other ear. The only thing stopping me is what might become of it once im in the working environment..

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