This is what I see on the Silver Lake Road, about 5 miles from my house. That's the back of Silver Lake Mountain on the right. You can really tell it's early spring, there's a hint of red in the trees (or maybe I'm optimistically imagining that) and there's way little snow on the ground. At my house it's very different. We lost about 2 feet of snow this week but the snow still comes to about mid-calf. We're getting there, but there are huge piles where the plows have pushed the snow. This time of year it seems as if those piles will be there forever. The only bare ground is in the driveway and that's rapidly turning to mud, which means I'll be parking at the end of the driveway and walking through boot-sucking mud to the house. This can last for a long time, depending on the weather. Most years I'm impatient and end up with deep ruts in my driveway--or worse, like last year when my car sunk up to the axles and I had to call AAA to have it yanked out with a tow-trucks winch. That was very impressive.
The other day I followed a snow plow along this road--hard to believe they were plowing less than a week ago. It was making a little shelf along the side of the road. That reminded me of a story my mother told me about going to the 1939 World's Fair in New York City (Flushing, to be exact). She said she would take the train and subway there by herself--she was 13 then, and she would take her lunch in a paper bag. There was a shelf in a tunnel the train passed by and once the train stopped there and she had this huge urge to put her lunch on that shelf through the open window. I could relate to that story, as I'm sure we all can. I used to have this really strong urge to drop my keys down the strom drain in the parking lot here at work. I'd look down the grate as I'd walk to my car and imagine what it would be like if I did that. Then I'd think of my mother and chuckle.
This time when I thought of my mother and that shelf I thought of the trip we took to the 1963 World's Fair, again in Flushing. My mother bravely drove us from Illinois to her parents' home in NJ and we went to the World's Fair, all three children plus my brother's friend Greg Nelson. I had a huge crush on him, but I was 10. Anyway, there were all these pavillions and kiosks. This was the premiere of Disney's "It's a Small World" exhibit and you rode through the darkened pavillion where there were animated characters. Animated characters were a big deal then.
There was a Turk who had a kiosk and sold Turkish puzzle rings. Molly and I were enthralled. It wasn't that long prior to that that we had lived in Turkey, and we loved playing with and putting together Turkish puzzle rings. He liked us (there was that attraction to blue-eyed, blonde American girls) and we kept going back to his kiosk to play with his rings. Finally he gave me (and Molly?) a ring. It was a man's ring, huge, and I could never wear it but I kept it in my drawer for years. I'd take it out look at it many, many times.
We were really excited about going to the World's Fair and as I remember it, we had a great time. Liza and I talked about it recently, and neither one of us had very clear memories of it, which I thought was too bad. In 1967 I got to go to Expo 67, another World's Fair, in Montreal. Pretty cool.
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