Today is Sunday, August 19 and there are only 73 days until Halloween, so go out and start buying candy.  Just be careful that your stuff for trick or treaters doesn’t have Christmas decorations on it.  Today we remember the birthdays of John Dryden, Seth Thomas and Malcolm Forbes.  On this day in 1909 the first race was held at the Indianapolis 500 Speedway, in 1960 Francis Gary Powers was convicted of spying by the USSR (the U-2 incident) and in 1967 the Beatles’ “All You Need is Love” single hit #1.  In the US it is National Aviation Day and National Soft Ice Cream Day.

Recently, I talked about some of Barbara’s family coming to NJ to visit and I mentioned that we went down the shore and got to see the fireworks over the boardwalk.  I noticed an interesting thing that night as we walked, watched the kids go on rides and ate fried food.  Early in the evening, they began setting up the launchers on the beach for the fireworks.  As they did that, people started to gather, sitting on the benches facing the launch area.  I am talking about several hours before the show would start.  These benches had backs that could be moved so that you could look at the ocean or switched so that you could watch the show go by on the boardwalk.  The people sitting on the benches all sat facing the ocean.

As the time got closer for the show to start, people started to crowd the boardwalk in the area where the fireworks were going to go off.  It got quite packed and I have to admit I am not sure why.  The area where they were being done had no tall buildings or trees or anything that would obstruct your view.  The fireworks were all sent straight up into the air and you could see them from just about anywhere and yet a large crowd of people pushed into a relatively small area.  The people sitting on the benches got to watch them launch, but, having seen that before, I am not sure what the big thrill was.  We were a couple hundred feet from “ground zero” and had a great view.  Also, we were not packed into a crowd and were relatively comfortable watching and eating.

I find the entire boardwalk thing very interesting.  I watched people spend a lot of money so that their kid could hammer a platform and try to get a frog into a moving lily pad.  If they did they would win a prize.  Not once did it seem to occur to anyone that they could have purchased five or six “prizes” at Walmart for what they spent there.  We went in to one of the arcades and watched people pump tons of money into machines to win tickets that could be cashed in for more prizes.  But let’s be honest.  Who doesn’t want to spend $20 so their kid can get a plastic spider and some gum?

I was grocery shopping recently and it occurred to me that I am becoming, at best curmudgeonly and at worst a curmudgeon.  The former means that I am still the “me” I have always been, but things can get me peeved.  The latter means that everything gets me peeved and I am not the loveable guy I used to be.  I want to believe that I am curmudgeonly, at least for now.

I realized that many of the things I experienced on my shopping sojourn set me off.  The drive to the store entailed riding behind every 90 year old with a driver’s license.  I swear that one woman in front of me had to alternate between seeing where she was going and using the gas and brake pedals.  There was no way she was doing them at the same time.  I managed to get behind one guy that made me want to run up to his car and ask if he was okay.  He drove as if he was in the middle of a seizure or something.  I found myself complaining out loud, as if it would help.  For information purposes let me just say that it does not.

When I got to the store parking lot, it seemed like every car in front of me was waiting for the same handicapped parking space to open up, although I did think that a couple of the old guys were just napping.  At least one third of the lot was empty, but most of the cars were waiting for people to load their groceries and leave so that they could take the space and not have to walk an extra 10 feet.  Maybe if they walked a little they would not have a butt the size of Rhode Island.  The problem was getting by them to the open spaces.  These people who are so reluctant to walk pull their car up in such a way that you cannot get by them.  I guess they feel they are preventing you from getting their space.  What makes it worse is that they pull up so far that the car in the space cannot get out.  Now they have to back up which creates a whole other set of problems.

Let me tell you something else I discovered.  Early afternoon is not a good time to go grocery shopping.  Unless, of course, you like putting yourself in situations that make you want to strangle people.  I was behind one man who walked down the middle of the aisle.  He would take seven or eight steps, stop and look around as if on a tour, take another set of seven or eight steps, look around and on and on and on.  Fortunately, the rows are not that long and after 15 minutes we got to the end and I was able to get around him.  When I was finished and leaving the store I saw him again and he was only about one third of the way through the store and only had six items in his cart.

This week our fact tells us that every two thousand frowns creates one wrinkle.  Let me tell you, this past week, alone, I saw a number of women who must have spent most of their life frowning.  Cheer up people!  You’ll feel better and you won’t have as many wrinkles.