J.P.

There are people working everyday at the local elementary school. For the past 60+ days I’ve noticed March events on the marquee. I guess they’re too busy cleaning the building to share well wishes or even a blank message on the sign.

The lingering messages of events in March are a reminder of what was and what is now.

My favorite scent of the season is the scent of lilac. Dark purple, light purple, white, doesn’t matter, lilac is a glorious scent that makes me feel centered and happy.

Grandma City had several lilac bushes along the back fence of her backyard back in the day. I wonder if the lilac bushes are still there. Every spring she’d cut a couple of flowers and have them in a vase on the kitchen table. The scent was wonderful in the carpeted kitchen. She took a couple of shoots of one of the bushes and planted them near our mobile home in the early 1970s. It grew slowly but sturdily and would have a couple of flowers for the rest of the springs we lived on that lot. I missed the scent of those lilacs when we moved across the street to the new house. Curiously, we had no lilacs at the new house. I always wondered if there was just too much sand in the soil. We lived over what had once been Lake Ontario thousands of years ago. There were sand dunes not too far from our little village, even though the shore of Lake Ontario was seven miles to the west.

When my husband and I moved into our first house together in 1997 I was happy to see there were lilac bushes along the back deck. When we had new landscaping installed a couple of years later the lilac bushes all stayed; the new landscaping was designed around the lilacs. Over the years a couple of smaller bushes started popping up in the vicinity of the older bushes. We took one of them with us to the new house in 2003. When we moved to Chicago in 2017, the relocated lilac bush was tall and strong and doing quite well. I hope it’s still there.

There are a few lilac bushes along the sidewalks in our neighborhood. At this time of year I stop and smell them during my morning walk. I think of Grandma City. I can hear her saying, “Hi, John”, in her Grandma City voice.

It all makes me smile.

Last night was the series finale of ABC’s “How To Get Away With Murder”. No spoilers here; so you don’t have to worry about the content of this blog post.

My husband and I have watched the series since day one and while some of the storylines have been a little out there and there has been some unevenness along the way, particularly with the last one or two seasons, Viola Davis is a powerhouse and for the most part the supporting cast has been strong.

With the series finale I know I’m a little sad to see the story come to an end but they wrapped everything up well and didn’t take any last minute wild detours to try to close everything up with a pretty bow. In the series’ universe little of the finale felt contrived.

I particularly enjoyed the addition of Amirah Vann to the cast a couple of seasons ago and I always enjoyed her scenes. While a completely different experience, I feel the same way I felt when “Downton Abbey” came to an end, satisfied with the ending, hopeful for a movie someday, and sad that our regular viewing has come to an end.

I’ve spent much of the evening doing research for my ultra-geek website, The Vintage Point of Sale site. Tonight I concentrated on the systems at the long defunct department Store, Zayre. Or, maybe it was spelled *Zayre. Either way, I’m pretty sure *Zayre was using the asterisk long before Wal*mart, which is now *Walmart.

As I browsed through some old *Zayre commercials, I remembered that back in the day they were the stand-out discount department store at the holidays because they were (gasp) open 24 hours a day between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Unheard of in the 1980s!

I know everything is open all ways all the time these days, but back in the 1980s *Zayre would feature these “60 Hour Sales” during the holidays, where everything was specially marked for 60 hours straight, morning to night and back to morning again.

I shopped at *Zayre in the middle of the night during the 1986 Christmas holiday shopping season simply because I was in college and I could. It was around 3:00 a.m. and there were quite a few people in the brand new store in Dunkirk, New York. There was a little bit of a kicker though; you couldn’t check out for about an hour in the middle of the night because the cash register system was doing its close of day. So the staff invited you to browse the specials while they moved the date up a notch.

I don’t think I’d want to walk into a *Walmart in the wee hours of the morning in the 21st century, but back in the day shopping at *Zayre in the middle of the night was kind of nifty.

Ah, simpler times.

I haven’t ridden the train in over two months. This is highly unusual but to be expected with this whole pandemic thing going on. On my daily walk this morning it suddenly hit me, I miss silently observing people and watching the world go by.

It’s difficult to sit and observe people when everyone is trying to avoid one another and/or have masks covering their face. I thoroughly enjoy watching people just go about their business. I learn from people and I learn to appreciate people. Two months into these lockdowns and I’m realizing this may be the hardest thing I’m dealing with, not being able to watch people as easily as I’d like to.

Being around people, but not necessarily interacting with them, is what keeps my introverted self happy. Many think of introverts as folks curled up in a corner reading a book. That’s definitely something I enjoy. But I’m probably happier when I’m alone in a crowded room. Let me sit on the sidelines and watch people be people.

People are fascinating. Yeah, lately they’ve been rather irritating, but for the most part, people are fascinating. I’m almost always impressed in some way with a person.

I look forward to the day when we’re all able to be in relatively the same space again. It’ll be nice to watch the world go by again.