I saw something today that put me right back into the 1970’s and the television show WKRP in Cincinnati. In one of the best of the series, the station holds a promotion where they … well, here’s the video:

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Images, music, scents, and tastes from our youth often come screaming out of the closet when an appropriate neuron fires in recognition. I had that happen today. Partly it was because of WKRP, partly because I have a twisted mind that operates in it’s own universe.

I’d just been to Walmart to buy dog biscuits, shower curtains, and cold medicine. Sounds like a party, right? Well, as I rounded the curve in the road leaving the big box, I spotted one of those construction platforms at full extension about five stories up. The kind you use to put pallets of sheet rock on the roof of a building site.

Dangling from the platform was a banner. When I got close enough to read the banner I spotted a bunch of little tents from a local radio station adorning the front of the grocery store where the construction crane was located. My brain immediately sent my eyes searching for turkeys plummeting to the earth. It’s kind of cold today, I figured maybe they were just chucking 25 pound Butterball’s from the platform. I have no clue what they were doing, but it did make me laugh.

If anyone was watching, that’s what I was laughing about: a great memory from almost four decades ago.

Tomorrow, most of us will share memories with our families, including a few moments that are on a par with turkey bombing in the world of the surreal. All of us have some memory of Thanksgiving that we bring to the fore when the event rolls around. I certainly do, and it’s not the warm family home with the dog under the table and the pie in the oven.

Nope, I have two of those memories. The first is Monterrey, California, three decades ago. I had my meal at the Naval Post Graduate School. My girlfriend (currently my wife) was back at the barracks in a narcotic fog. She’d elected to get her wisdom teeth pulled the day before Thanksgiving. Gooned out would be too kind a phrase for the impact of the drugs on that blond hottie. I got special permission from the Officer of the Day to have her stay in my barracks room and be in my bed while we watched Bewitched reruns on my $50.00 Gold Star television. Lunch was great, taking care of her even better. One of those bonding things that couples have to go through to know if they’re going to make it in the long run.

The second memory that always runs up is 1987 on the U.S.S. Coral Sea. I wrote about it two years ago (hard to believe this thing is still around, isn’t it?) and refer you to the story to read it in full. A time of my life that has guided me to this day.

I am blessed to be here to write this today. I know that full well. I thank you for your patronage. I’m not focused on statistics, but it is with great joy that I report that this blog has been visited over 1,000,000 times in the past three years. Throw out the robots from the search engines, and it still leaves me with approximately 750,000 visits in that time. Here’s the first blog post ever. I’m putting it up just to show that I have improved somewhat with practice.

It’s time for me to blog. Almost every day I have some useless thing to blather about that somehow eludes me when I sit down later to actually put it to paper. I can now spew nonsense from my phone. And I will do just that as time permits.

In the meantime, thanks for dropping by.

I wish you a Happy Thanksgiving.

Be well.

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