Kaymusings

This is a scene from Beach 8 at Presque Isle (the Peninsula) in Erie, PA. It was a very hot day and going to the beach was a refreshing way to deal with heat and cool off a little. Our time at the beach turned out to be the break that we needed. The water felt bracing and cool, –very welcome to us.

I love to watch the sea gulls. I learned a song about them when I was teaching third grade. The song says they are “bold as can be.” They are! That’s part of the fun. It ends, “They scold and they chatter and make mournful cries.” That rings true, too.

It’s fun to watch the other people at the beach. Some of them go to relax in the sun and get a deeper tan. That’s hard to understand in this time when there is so much awareness about the harm that is done by lengthy exposure to the sun’s rays. Others read or hang out with friends, but most people spend a lot of time cooling off in the water.

Before we came home, we had dinner at a restaurant in Erie. Then we were fed and relaxed and ready to call it a day.

An afternoon at a beach at Presque Isle is great summer fun.

Cooling off at the beach

The blooms of the night blooming cereus open only at night. They open when the sun goes down and in the morning they hang depleted and wilted. A bloom usually takes a couple of weeks to come to maturity. If I forget to check the plant each night when a bloom is almost ready to open, I miss seeing the loveliness of it.

Here in PA, the plant doesn’t bloom often, –just a few times during the summer months.

Recently it surprised me with two blooms in one night. If I pick them and put them in the refrigerator, I can show them to others the next day, before they wilt into compost material.

Recently the plant surprised me with two blooms one night. The blooms look like orchids but the plant is a member of the cactus family.

These beautiful blooms last only one night.

I went shopping this afternoon, for groceries. I have been housebound for going on a month now while I tend Rusty who is recovering from surgery. He’s almost well now and a friend watched him for me while I got some groceries.

When I was toting my grocery bags into the house, I started to remember when I was a checkout clerk at the Grand Union when I was in college. Today my purchases were placed in a lot of nearly empty plastic bags. When I was a clerk, we had to neatly pack the groceries into large brown paper bags. A grocery clerk back then had to learn how to pack things neatly and efficiently with heavy things on the bottom and perishable things on top. Today a person can grab the handles of the plastic bags and carry many of them into the house at once. Back then, a person with four or five bags of groceries made more than one trip to unload the car.

But that wasn’t all that is different. Another thing, we had to have the groceries unloaded from the store cart, and lined up neatly on the counter. Then we would start at one end and touching each item with one hand, we would punch in the price on the cash register with the other hand. A really good clerk was aware of the price of each item and any changes that would be made daily.

In New York, where I worked, we were not allowed to give savings stamps for the price of milk or beer. Remember Green Stamps? Haven’t seen them for years. This policy sometimes made it possible for wily customers to get away without paying for their heavy packs of beer. They would put it on the bottom of the grocery cart, since it was so heavy and we would deal with the other purchases, saving the beer to last. And then once in a while, the check out clerk would forget the beer and the customer didn’t pay for it.

Being a check out clerk was a demanding job. It probably still is, but scanning prices and plastic bags must make it easier for clerks today.