Whose attic would the stuff be in? Perhaps a more relevant question would be, “Whose grandparents’ attic would the stuff be in?”
    A recent visitor to the Optic made a highly unusual request, and he may have been 50 years late in making it. David Lindblom, a filmmaker living in New York, showed up with Judee Williams, a local movie and history buff, to ask for anything that might help him with some compendious research he’s doing on Romaine Fielding, an actor, director and producer who filmed what was then the most expensive movie ever made in America, “The Golden God,” in 1913.

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   Did Lawrence lust after Martha? He must have, since he as much as admitted it to his friend Roger. Or was Roger interested only in clear communication?
    I’m referring to the closing graphs of a recent column, in which Lawrence and Roger met in a nightclub and Roger asked Lawrence, “What do you think of Martha and I as a potential twosome?”
    And Lawrence replied, “Martha and me would be more like it.”

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    A class reunion is a great opportunity to get caught up on one’s classmates.
    It wasn’t exactly my classmates who caught me up, but rather those of the Springer High School classes of 1961-64, of which my wife Bonnie was a member. Bonnie’s class, which graduated 30-plus students, had the largest showing, around 20, of four consecutive classes, quite a feat inasmuch as the class of ‘61 is the oldest of the four.
    Bonnie told me she’d completely forgotten a couple of the attendees, and in fairness, said a different couple of classmates couldn’t place her either.
    She needn’t feel bad. At the 20-year reunion of that class, in 1981, attended by roughly the same people, I wanted to test their sincerity.

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Four of us Trujillo siblings got together over the weekend after they’d arrived in town to attend a Calcutta program, a fund-raiser-dinner for the Immaculate Conception Church.
    Several of us gathered for breakfast at the Spic and Span Saturday, a repeat of what we may have done 30 or 40 times for 30 or 40 years. And because of what’s been in the local news lately, it struck me that the missing ingredient at the tables was cigarettes; years ago, several of us would have lit up — along with most of the patrons there.

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What would happen if someone were to call a major airport and say, “I have an exploding suitcase”?
    If someone were to make that call, immediately, the Transportation Security Administration would find ways to ban all luggage from flights.
    And even though we read about how the TSA had begun to ease up on some of the draconian measures for screening passengers, apparently word hadn’t really gotten around.

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COPENHAGEN, Denmark — An article a few years back in Psychology Today attempted to explain why the much-discussed “middle child” differs from the others. One of the reasons, the writer posited, was that the parents teach the first-born to talk, whereas the second child and subsequent children acquire most of their verbal skills from the older sibling.
Other skills, painstakingly taught to the elder by the parents, get passed on through the older-sibling conduit.

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    COPENHAGEN, Denmark — In addition to spending time with our first-born, Stan, a key reason for traveling to this part of Scandinavia was to explore ways in which people communicate and how one country influences another.
    My admittedly sparse familiarity with German, which I studied under Jean Johnson and the late Jose Pablo Garcia, hasn’t been enough to get me by, although we hear more German than English.
    Months before the trip, I’d been hearing about American influence on countries such as Denmark — some may call it “corruption” — and observing and listening to the natives let me find out how much and in what ways.

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    A line by English poet Alexander Pope has long impressed me: “Be not the first by whom the new are tried / Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.”
    I entered the computer-Internet crowd with some trepidation, wondering what advantage computers held over electric typewriters. At the time, the early ‘90s, my colleague Bruce Papier raved about the infinite possibilities of the Internet. He often bought programs for his computers and passed on to me several reputable dictionaries and encyclopedias that came bundled with the purchases.

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    “Keep backing up, Dad. You’ve got at least three meters to go.”
    “But Adam, I can’t think metric! How close am I — really?”
    Thus went a terse dialogue a quarter-century ago, when our oldest son was telling me how much real estate I had to back up the pickup for dumping trash, before falling off a precipice at least a kilometer deep. Clearly he was doing only as he learned from math teachers at Memorial Middle School.
    But those of us who grew up using English units are dia-metric-ally opposed to anything new.

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    It’s 2:17 a.m.; I’m sitting on my front porch with my laptop, watching the rain cascade over the eaves troughs and rain spill into the barrel we bought for harvesting rainfall. This rain, only one of dozens in the monsoons of July and August, could have filled millions of barrels.
    What I first thought was a roaring jet engine was really another of a series of rainfalls that awoke me and probably most of San Miguel County this week.
    So much moisture have we had to date that only recently did a state religious group almost take credit for having prayed too hard for moisture.
    They’re considering sending a thanks-but-we’re-fine-for-now-type prayer this time.

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