Back in the day

Whats missing in this great memory of previous times is that all these people had keys to our house.
In addition to the deliveries listed we had a “Ice Man” who delivered directly to the huge double door “ice box.” He wore a cool leather outfit that protected him from the ice blocks he carried over his shoulder, held securely by big tongs. If we were quick on our feet we could ride in his wide open truck chewing ice chips he’d shave for us.
The butcher always declared he would choose, and deliver, meat as "tender as a woman's heart."
One other service not mentioned is that the garbage men would come through the bottom of our house, fetch the garbage tubs, take them to the truck and return them to their delegated spot.
Oh yeah, we had coal delivery…
Ah, those were the days. 

Home Delivery! What Will They Think of Next?
By PETER FUNT JUNE 29, 2017 NY Times

“I’m rooting for Amazon and companies like Peapod and FreshDirect to hurry up and complete their revolution of the grocery delivery business so that it can be almost as good as it was 60 years ago.
Without the benefit of drones — or for that matter, the internet — here’s how it worked at our home in Westchester County, north of New York City. Twice a week, my mother would phone the Parkway grocery store in town and rattle off her needs to one of the establishment’s three owners. They would hurry through the staples and dry goods and then spend a bit more time mulling possibilities with meats and produce after Mom asked, “What looks good?”
A few hours later, a man named Pete would chug up our driveway in the Parkway delivery truck and carry a sturdy box — always a box, never a bag — directly to our kitchen. Wearing his long white grocery store apron, Pete would just leave the box on the table. He put anything perishable in the refrigerator.
This twice-weekly ritual came to mind the other day as I read a long article in this paper about the challenges of home delivery. It noted that “delivering food requires military precision.” The report was accompanied by many, many photos underscoring the enormous task of delivering perishables to people’s homes.
It also reminded me of the twice-a-week deliveries we received from Gene in his Emmadine Farms milk truck. There was no need to phone ahead. Gene just showed up every Monday and Thursday in a step van that had a picture of a cow on each side. Water dripped out of the truck, even in winter, as the ice used to keep things cool melted.
The most intriguing part, at least to my pre-teenage eyes, was that the truck had no seat. Gene drove it while standing up. And he always wore galoshes. Even in summer, he’d wear unbuckled snow boots (and Bermuda shorts) as he toted his metal carrier with milk, cream and butter straight to our fridge.
Of course this marvelous home-delivery system wasn’t limited to groceries. In fact, back in the pre-Amazon days just about everything you needed magically showed up at the door.
When one of us was sick, Dr. Victor Landes drove over in his dark-blue sedan, wearing the requisite suit and tie and carrying his little black bag. I was always amazed at how the contents of an entire doctor’s office seemed to fit into that bag.
If we needed medicine, he would phone a prescription to Robbins Pharmacy and a few hours later one of the high school students who worked there part-time would drive over with the order.
Every morning James Gray delivered The New York Herald Tribune in his blue VW bus. And each afternoon a woman in a beat-up station wagon delivered the local paper, The Citizen Register. I never caught her name because she managed to toss the paper neatly onto the driveway without ever slowing down.
Oil to heat our home in winter was delivered in a smelly truck by the Maui Oil Company. If Mom was having special guests, we’d get a delivery of flowers from Swanson Florist. On Saturday, we often got a delivery of lumber and building supplies from Gerstein’s hardware store.
And yes, even back then a highlight was the periodic, and tantalizingly unpredictable, arrival of the United Parcel Service truck. Oddly, while so many things have changed, the U.P.S. truck looked exactly the same back then as it does today — except instead of bringing packages from an Amazon warehouse, it carried boxes from Sears or Bonwit Teller or some other department store.
Really, I had forgotten that our existence was so quaint — and convenient. It’s beginning to meld in my memory with scenes from “The Music Man” about the highly anticipated visits of the Wells Fargo wagon by folks in River City, Iowa.
I love home delivery, and I’m a big fan of Amazon’s one-click shopping. I usually get at least one book a week, and we just received a replacement steam iron and a three-pack of undershorts. Life is good.
But it’s hardly new or novel. As I recall, the postman always rang twice, but Pete from Parkway just let himself in through the kitchen door.”

Access For All

Over the next month I will share a lot of information on Proposition #1 and how it will help so many in King County experience opportunities in the Arts, Science and Heritage studies. The link after the following quote will provide you with the list of recipients of these funds.
"Access for All will provide increased funding for arts, science and heritage education and access for students and families throughout King County. With Access for All, we will invest in programs that change lives, give more kids access to the same opportunities and help our communities thrive.
In August, voters will be asked to increase cultural access funding by raising the county sales tax 0.1 percent — just one penny for every $10 spent, or $30 a year for the average household. If approved in August, we will increase funding for regional and community arts, science, and heritage institutions by about $70 million, which will be spent on programs like in-school education and free and reduced ticket programs for low-income and middle-class families..."

https://www.culturalaccesswa.org/member-organizations

Be kind...

One of those stories that can be read, thought about, read, thought about and...
“My second child was born two days after Father’s Day in 1990. Three weeks later, my husband collapsed, disoriented and feverish, in a restaurant. Soon, he was lying in a hospital bed with full-blown AIDS.
It’s hard for people who weren’t around then to imagine what AIDS used to look like. It was an epidemic that turned young men old; murdered beauty and promise. You knew someone at work who wouldn’t feel well, you wouldn’t see him for a few days, you would never see him again.
AIDS made men ghosts.
Before he got sick, John was an attentive lover to me, a doting dad to our 2-year-old, a gracious son-in-law to my aging parents and a successful journalist. He was home for dinner every night like clockwork. He was someone it was hard to believe could get AIDS.
In the months before our son was born, John had been experiencing a string of nagging illnesses, including intestinal distress and a persistent cough. The many doctors he consulted, because he was “straight,” married and overworked, did not even consider AIDS. They diagnosed stress.
After John’s AIDS diagnosis, I was rushed in for my own test. It remains the scariest thing I’ve ever done. Back then, it could mean a death sentence.
I asked him how he happened to contract a disease largely transmitted through gay sex. He told me he’d slept with men, which, at the time, surprised me. It was the beginning of a world falling apart.
My AIDS test came back negative: The kids and I had been spared. But nine months later, John died, leaving me asking, “What just happened?”
He left me crying out for him in the night. He left me with many painfully unresolved feelings and unanswered questions. John also left me with two small children, and I was determined to raise them free from the stigma of AIDS.
I resolved that I had to keep how he died a secret. No one could know. We never talked about him. I stashed away all his pictures. When the kids were old enough, I shared the truth with them, and emphasized why they couldn’t talk about it — or their father.
I then determined to give us a picture perfect life, in a suburban Connecticut house with a white picket fence, and a really nice man, a former altar boy and Eagle Scout, no less, filling John’s Italian loafers. I worked in children’s publishing and brought home cute books. We had a rescue dog!
Life was good, and I was proud of how I’d restored us.
What I wasn’t proud of, though, was continuing to keep John a secret. I wanted my kids to know about their father, who had once been a great guy — before AIDS. I wanted to Photoshop John into our family picture, undiseased.
For a while I found a way to do this by taking them to New Hampshire every summer, to visit John’s grave in a sunny corner of a maple-shaded family plot. It was hushed, peaceful and green. They’d stand at shy attention at his footstone, their sneakered feet pressed tightly together, their chubby hands offering up tired-looking daisies. Sometimes they’d sing camp songs, and leave behind dream catchers.
Beneath the dignity of his tombstone, desexed, sanitized and dead, John could be a father my kids could really respect. He could even be a husband I could like again.
But by the time they hit middle school, my kids didn’t want to go to New Hampshire anymore. They didn’t seem to want to do anything connected to their late father.
They left for college at about the same time I lost both my job and my elderly parents. My relationship with my boyfriend also flattened; we’d been wonderful caretakers together, now what? I began to feel compelled to thaw those unresolved feelings I’d put on ice in 1990.
No more Photoshop. No more family tableaux. No more sanitizing cemeteries. Just me, John and AIDS.
I read his love letters. I looked at pictures from when we were young, beautiful and smitten. I began to practice saying, “My husband died of AIDS.” I began to write.
And I began to stop caring if my kids ever felt anything at all for their late father they barely knew. I realized you can’t manufacture such things.
Then, in 2009, my daughter graduated from John’s alma mater, Brown University, where the alumni participate in the processional. After the ceremony was over, my daughter surprised me by asking, “Mom, didn’t you think today was sad? I looked at the Class of ’76 and thought, where’s Dad? Why isn’t he here?”
Three years later, after receiving his diploma from Claremont McKenna College, my son said, his eyes glistening, “Mom, you know who I thought about during the whole ceremony? My father.”
Relieving John of his ghostly status after he died of AIDS has been a long and, at times, painful process. Some family members and friends have viewed my talking and writing about John truthfully as a form of “outing.” “Why now, after so long?” they ask. Can’t I just get over it? Mostly heterosexual and married, virtually none had walked in my — or his — shoes. They failed to grasp the weight of John’s closeted lifestyle, and how crippling it was, first for him, and then for me, to keep it closeted.
They failed to grasp how powerful and indelible was the stain of his disease.
This reaction, for me, has been painful, causing me many nights of fitful sleep. Was I doing the right thing, telling John’s truth — now mine?
I now know that telling our story honestly was the right thing to do. To relieve John of ghostly status has been liberating. For so long I’d thought I was just among a handful of women who’d lost their husband to AIDS; but during AIDS Walks, I have marched alongside thousands of women who have lost a husband to this “gay man’s disease.” We have stories we can finally tell.
Recently my kids and I went to a revival of the musical “Falsettos,” which deals with familiar issues: a gay husband and father, a man lost to AIDS, a wife calling into the night.
My children and I went to dinner and talked afterward, about their father, and about how hard it’s been, for so long, to not talk about him, to deny his existence. In telling our story honestly, we have brought John back in three-dimensional, human terms. He happened, we happened, it happened.
On Father’s Day 2017, John is no longer a ghost.”

Maggie Kneip is the author of the memoir “Now Everyone Will Know: The Perfect Husband, His Shattering Secret, My Rediscovered Life.”

M Barrett Miller, founder of Let Kids Be Kids, is the author of "Ice", a book sharing the courage of those challenged by HIV/AIDS. Available on iTunes https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/ice/id806501717?mt=11