History Adventuring

Let's time-travel back to 1917 Phoenix, Arizona and go to Bayless Grocery Company. Some of it will be wonderfully easy, and some of it will be terribly difficult. Do you have your list? Let's go! We just walk up to the counter and ask for things - no need for a shopping cart. How easy! But this is where it gets difficult - you have to tell the person behind the counter what you need, specifically by name and size (or weight). Speaking for myself, this would be extremely difficult because I'm so used to walking up and down aisles at the Walmart Neighborhood Market and picking things up I really can't tell you the names, especially the brands, of things I get all of the time, and weights and measures are still kind of a mystery. How many quarts in a hogshead? Pecks in a bushel? Let's start with getting some honey, sugar, tomatoes, and coffee. There doesn't seem to be a size for the honey - is fifteen cents for a comb a good price? Twelve pounds of sugar sounds lik

Although most of my history adventuring is done in my imagination, traveling into the distant past or future, I was actually there in the 1970s. In fact, that's when I learned how to drive a car. Time-travel with me. I learned to drive on my parents 1973 Ford Torino Station Wagon, which was a monstrous, clumsy boat of a car that had a hood that a friend of mine in high school described as "getting there fifteen minutes before you did". In fact, the nose of the car was so ridiculously long that my dad actually made a bump-out at the end of the garage for it to fit so you could close the garage door. Parking that car in the tiny garage that my parents had was like threading a needle! By the way, we're in Minneapolis, Minnesota in the neighborhood where I grew up, which was built in the late 1920s. But don't imagine that it was some kind of historic neighborhood, it was just old, and very worn. The streets were terribly narrow, and even more so after it snowed (which

I saw a car today that said "Student Driver" on it, and it's made me want to time-travel a bit. Whether it's the distant future, or not so far away, student drivers as we know them, will end. Cars will become automated, the same way that elevators did, and so many other things that we take for granted that don't require a human being to operate them. Speaking for myself, I was proud of the things that I started learning at age 16 that allowed me to operate an automobile. By the time that I was a student driver cars had gotten much easier to operate than in my grandpappy's time, with automatic transmissions, power steering, that kind of thing. Still, it took some skill to learn how to turn the steering wheel, apply the brakes, etc. so that you didn't bump (or crash!) into things. I prided myself on learning to come to such a smooth stop while driving my parents' Torino station wagon that it felt as soft as drifting into a cloud. Of course, when I first

I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the

Since I've always been interested in history, going back to when I was a little kid, I've always been interested in politics. And while "politics" mostly means some cigar-chomping politician backing down on his promises, it really just has to do with how people govern themselves in groups. And no, it's not always fair, particularly since people tend to pick political leaders based on things like height (George Washington was very tall!). Whenever someone comes up to me and grabs my lapels talking about politics, I will ask if they're interested in politics, and most people just aren't, they let go of my lapels and wander off. And maybe it's because people remember having to memorize stuff in school, and really don't want to think about that after they grow up. But I don't remember memorizing anything in school, not really, I just remember being a curious, nerdy, little kid. I wanted to know everything - did George Washington really have wooden

Let's time-travel back to the six century (500s) in Medieval Britain. And if you're wondering why I'm not calling it England, it wasn't called England yet, because the group of Germanic people who settled there, called the Angles, hadn't really arrived yet. Yes, Angle-land in the future, but Britain where we're going. It was named by the Romans, who called it Brittany. And yes, that's how it works with tribes of people, to themselves they're just "the people", and it's outsiders who give them names. Let's go visit the Britons in the days of King Arthur. At this point I'm really not clear what language was being spoken there at the time so we'll need to bring along our "automatic translators". No, it's not Old English, which was Germanic, and came over with the Angles, Jutes and Saxons, and since there are no written records in Britain at the time right after the Romans left, I'd say that it's a mix of Celti