C'mon 2010

Well, it’s New Year’s week. I don’t know about the rest of you but at our office Christmas party this year we said good riddance to 2009 and buried it with about 6 inches of real dirt. Then kissed 2010 hello full on the lips. As so many companies in and around our industry, we had a tough year. When our clients get the financial flu….we buy Kleenex by the truck load. We had fewer sales, tighter margins and fewer orders.
But next year…now that’s a different story. This is our year. And who I mean by “our” is all of us. A lot of this has to do with consumer confidence. With a new governor dedicated to trying to bring some sanity to New Jersey’s spending and relieving us of some of the burden of State Employees who number north of 70,000 people coupled with our business community finally letting go after holding our breath for the last year or so, we’ll be back to building, distributing and buying stuff and services again. Jobs will slowly come back. First the temporary employees then the temp to hire positions and we’ll be on our way. At the same time we'll start to buy with a more discriminating eye. Not so much how cheap things are but the smart managers will be looking at quality and value and measuring efficiencies and effectiveness. We just need to get our swagger back. I mean, what’s America without our swagger? America without swagger makes us France. Anybody been to Johnny Depp's house lately? Oh, c'mon lighten up. The only thing wrong with France is that French people live there.
I keep seeing these TV commercials for Springsteen accepting the Kennedy Center Honors. I don’t know…it kind of makes me remember how I felt when Dylan went electric. Yeah, we got over it…but there’s still a little odor to it.
Couple of movies on my list this week: Invictus and Up In The Air. Invictus because it’s a Clint Eastwood movie and Up In The Air because my wife keeps telling me how good Clooney is. If I were a rookie at this marriage stuff, I’d argue with her. But the play here is to go to the movie and not complain. Speaking of movies ….don’t you hate it when they pimp a movie like this “Crazy Hearts” all over the media and it’s not playing in your area? Remember Precious? Same thing. By the way…now this guy Jeff Bridges … he’s definitely one of our great American actors. I think it’s him, Hoffman, Hackman and Nicholson…oh yeah, and if it’s a mixed crowd, there's Meryl Streep and that guy Clooney…hell of a job on ER, right?
Got some great books for Christmas. Enough to keep me busy this week. Most potential is from my daughter Jennifer: a biography of Ayn Rand. But the fun one is the Larry Bird, Magic Johnson book “When the Game Was Ours.” We’ll keep in touch on these, ok?
Remember now…this is our year. Let’s go get it. Happy New Year everybody.

Grandma Jenny's cherry pie

Somewhere along the line my Grandma Jenny got the idea that I loved cherry pie. It started when I was about 7 or 8 years old. Of course, I was one of those kids who ate everything and anything that wasn’t nailed down and never weighed more than a pair of sneakers. So, every year that I could remember Grandma baked me a cherry pie for Christmas. I was always expected to eat it in front of her attacking it mercilessly and completely. I typically polished it off in one day with Grandma watching each bite. At about 5’2” and almost that round, with silver hair and sparkling blue eyes, Grandma was that stereotypical Italian momma who made everything from scratch and was the quiet matriarch of our small, dysfunctional family.Well, this went on for years much to my puzzlement but also my enjoyment, for as it turned out, I wasn’t really that crazy about the traditional cherry pie but grandma’s was different. Maybe it was how she looked at me as I ate it. I always made her believe it was the very best present I got each and every Christmas. Somehow, I woke up one morning 16 going on 17 yrs. old. I developed a case of allergies to strawberries and cherry pie. If I so much as took a bite my face would look like somebody hit me with a can of cranberry sauce. Exactly what a healthy high school boy needs, right? So, sometime around January or February of my 17th year I began dropping hints to Grandma that I was now allergic to cherry pie and that we needed to move in another direction. Even with her broken English, I knew she heard me. I lobbied my mom to make sure she reminded Grandma …”no cherry pie this year, please”. The closer we got to Christmas the louder and more frequent came my reminders, until I was totally satisfied that everyone… from my Grandma Jenny to my Mom, my Dad, Grandpa Jack…and most of our neighbors knew that I was officially allergic to cherry pie and would prefer a traditional present. I expected a fountain pen or something like that.
Well, Christmas morning comes and sure enough as we bound down the stairs to open our gifts, there sitting in a circle around the tree is our nuclear family. Grandma stationed in her kitchen chair, since all grandma’s hate those soft living room chairs, right? They need a firm chair. At least my grandmas’ always did. Tearing through the presents I look curiously for the present from Grandma Jenny, wondering what will it be? All the gifts open there was, alas nothing from her or Grandpa. Wow, I hope she didn’t get mad at me for letting her know I didn’t want cherry pie. Just then, Grandma reaches down and hands me a box. My heart crushed as she handed me another cherry pie. My high school hormones began racing wondering…oh, no…what do I do. Nancy Davis will not be happy with her boyfriend looking like a can of cranberry sauce landed on his face. The kids at school will be merciless. Looking over at Grandma, her bright blue eyes shining and dancing as her mouth curled into that quiet smile as if she were presenting the grand prize to the winner of the contest showing how much she loved me. Looking at the pie, thinking of my friends at school and the total embarassment I would endure if I took even one bite, I smiled, picked up a fork and gobbled all the cherry pie I could eat. The hell with being embarrassed. When you have someone like Grandma Jenny in your life…and you know she’s doing something cause she loves you….even a teen aged boy has to get his priorities straight…For the next week I looked like my face got stabbed with a jelly pitch fork. But grandma smiled through every bite….and now she’s gone…and my memory of her is of her shining eyes, her smiling face…and the love she gave me as she watched me eat her cherry pie. I’m still allergic…and damn, I wish I could have just one more of her cherry pies. …. Don’t you wish you could bring back all those people in your life who gave you such wonderful memories? They left us their memories. Those are the nicest gifts I get every year. This year I lost some people who were really important to me. Christmas will be different without them. The rest of my life will be different without them. But I have a fresh box of memories that I will call on to gift wrap my holiday spirit. Remember the past as you salute the future. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all… and to all a very good night.

value, quality or cheap?

So, I've been thinking lately as I listen to everybody and their brother on every news channel talking about the economy, unemployment and how to fix stuff. "The Stimulas Plan didn't work"...."it did work"...."it's too soon to tell if it's working"..."we've only spent 10% of the money so how do we know if it's gonna work or not?".... Everybody's all over the place. Here's what I know. Unemployment is still flirting with the 10%+ area with true unemployment almost twice that number. The House keeps talking about how they can spend our money to stimulate the economy and get America back to work. I'm just thinking about this from a parochial point of view here but it seems to me that instead of spending another $800+Billion on an assortment of investments and programs the politicians think might help get things moving in the right direction... how about if they just created a wide range of programs and actually didn't spend any money. Instead they let small businesses sort through these support programs and we let them decide which ones they like and which will get them to take positive action..hiring...making stuff...buying stuff...etc... If we can get our country to once again decide that quality is what counts and NOT cheap prices and we get manufacturing focused on building and making stuff that is the BEST in the world instead of competing to be the cheapest....and as consumers we decided we were going to choose quality and value over cheap...wouldn't things kind of take care of themselves again? I mean, if we need consumer confidence to get people to spend money...and we started thinking with the values systems our forefathers gave us...and the small businesses in our community could choose the programs to invest in and they could decide where the government should spend our money instead of letting the politicians (most of whom never had to meet a payroll in their lives), wouldn't our economy and traditional values be more likely to put us back on track? I don't know...I just like the thought of our local business people and we each as consumers individually get to be in charge again...I just have a lot more confidence in us than I have in them. And, I've always believed in value and quality over cheap...don't you?

He's baaaaaack?????

Whoa....the flu totally had it's way with me. Ya know, back when I was around 8 maybe 9 years old, I was behind the old barn, sitting Indian style near Smokey's dog run, striking matches and quickly sniffing the sulfur before it went out...It was kinda fun. I was getting a little rush off it and feeling cool about it too. That is, until I got the sense maybe somebody like a hovering black cloud, was weighing in on me, only to look up and see my father standing there...all 12' of him, hands on hips...glaring down at me...like I was about to be squished with one deft swipe. He picked me up by my neck and toted me like I was his lunch pail...with only my legs and feet occasionally flicking the tips of the grass leading to our back steps. My room back in those days, was on the 3rd floor of an old house Dad had converted to 2 family, renting the other apartment out to a fellow cop named Frannie Yurick. (I always thought he had a sissy girl's name for a cop until I saw him shoot a perfect score of 300 at the Police Pistol Range. Suddenly, Mr. Frannie Yurick seemed to have a manly male name.) So, up to the third floor he dragged me, still occasionally bouncing the tips of my shoes now off the linoleum floors leading us there where he not so much parking me as tossing me across the room landing like dirty laundry on the foot of my bed. What could he be up to? Back in those days, it was anyone's guess. As a cop, my Dad was on a first name basis with every bartender in town and had a personal relationship with somebody he called Lord Calvert... which he proudly drank with water. This became his ritual since he became a cop who also happened to be an excellent pool player. So, he drank for free. Either because the Bartender would buy every 3rd drink in most of the bars in town or because he was winning at pool again, which he did most every night. So, being a depression kid my Dad thought it only responsible to not let free alcohol go to waste...you know... what with the kids starving in China and all. But, back to the bed. That's me sitting on the foot of the bed watching my Dad now kneel on the brown linoleum floor in front of me saying to myself "what could he be up to this time?" Well, he put a book of matches on the floor threw a couple of sheets out of my notebook on top and added a couple of socks as memory allows and started a nice little bon fire right there. My eyes must have looked like Little Orphan Annie as they popped out of my head. With that, he grabs my wrists with both hands and says to me..."so, you want to play with fire, huh tough guy?" and proceeds to dip my fingers into the fire. I jerked and flailed about, jumped around...unable to release his grip on my wrists until my fingers were screaming for some relief. "Where's my Mom? How come she's not helping me?" Finally, just as I was about to let him see me cry like a little girl, he lets go, snuffs out the fire...reaches over slaps some vaseline on my wrist, hands and fingers and says..."don't ever let me catch you playing with matches or fire again, you understand me?" Two things I learned from that lesson. 1. Don't ever go upstairs with your father when your Mom's at the store and 2. Never play with fire. Two lessons both well learned by a smart-assed kid with dirty hands. I had always used this pleasant little childhood memory as sort of a benchmark for life's little unpleasantries. You know...that wasn't as bad as when Dad burned my fingers or wow...that was worse than having the old man burn my fingers for playing with matches.
And then? Why, then...then I got the flu. There's the flu and then there's da flu.
Coughing up both your lungs, blowing your nose until you look like a coke head with a nose so red it matched our kitchen curtains.It's crazy bad...But the tough part is the medicine fog that engulfs you. There's the 17 pounds and 9 different varieties of cough drops...menthol, non-menthol and every other kind ever made...Robitussin, Anti-biotics, high blood pressure, blood thinner, beta blocker...you name it. You lose your sense of taste, hearing and smell. I stopped being able to spell multi-syllabic words by Thursday. Well, I put off going to the doctor until finally, it was see him or call the funeral parlor. See Doc on Thursday night ...better by Saturday morning. So, the question I ask myself is...please tell me why we men hate calling the doctor,even when it's a matter of life or breath...or asking directions or even asking for clarification? I mean, I could have been feeling better a week earlier if I had just called...and just listened. But, I'll tell you why.... it's because we're afraid we might look stupid... that's why...now, I've decided that after seeing how I handled the flu...doing something where I look stupid...well, that would just be redundant. And I think that goes for most of us men.So you see, no matter how old we men get...we're still acting like we're 8-9 years old...and now I have a whole new perspective on benchmarking life's unpleasant experiences. "That was worse than the flu I had in '09 or..that was nothing...the flu in '09 was a killer....I like this memory better, actually.
But, I feel much better today, thank you

Da Flu

is kicking my butt right now...Be back in a few days