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A Traffic Stop

7/30/2015

    A few years ago a friend told me about her altercation with a Columbus police officer over a traffic violation.
    My friend, a nice-looking, affluent professional woman and busy suburban soccer (and basketball, volleyball, softball and track) mom probably in her late 40's at the time, was driving one of her kids and some teammates to a high school basketball game across town.
    My friend was traveling Interstate 70 through downtown Columbus when, in a moment of confusion, she pulled off the freeway onto the ramp marked "No Fourth Street Exit" and from there proceeded to Fourth Street.
    As soon as she reached Fourth Street my friend saw behind her the flashing lights of a police cruiser accompanied by a loud, long, blaring siren.
    Through the cruiser's megaphone system a police officer ordered my friend to pull over.
    "I was terrified," my friend recounted, "the lights, the siren, the megaphone, my first thought was that I must have hit someone."
     My friend pulled over. There were two officers in the cruiser. One of them, a young man probably in his late twenties, approached my friend's van.
    "Officer, what did I do?!" cried my friend, her heart pounding.
    When the officer explained to her that she'd made an illegal exit off the freeway she cried, "What?! That's all? You turned on those sirens and that megaphone for a traffic violation? My God, I thought I'd done something terrible! I thought I'd hit someone! All you had to do was turn on your lights and I'd have pulled over, but you turned on that siren and that megaphone and you scared me, and you scared my kids!"
    "I was just so angry," my friend recalled, "I really let him have it!"
    Readers, how do you think the officer responded to my friend's tongue-lashing?
    "Oh, he said it was his partner who used the megaphone," my friend continued, "so I said, 'well, why doesn't he get out of that car and come over here?!'"
    "And the police officer didn't arrest you for mouthing off?" I asked my friend, incredulous.
    "Well, no, " she shrugged, "he just wrote me a ticket."
    And that was the end of my friend's story.   And both she and the police officer got on with their day and with their lives.
    My friend is white, by the way.

   Rest in peace, Samuel Dubose.

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What If?

7/27/2015

5 Comments

     "Recently, my brother and I were talking on the phone as he drove to work. He is the chief executive of a publicly traded company. He was dressed for work, driving a BMW. He was using a hands-free system....
    During the course of our conversation, he was pulled over by an officer who said he looked like an escapee from Pelican Bay State Prison in California...My brother told me he would call me right back. In the minutes I waited, my chest tightened. I worried. I stared at my phone. When he called back... He joked: “I thought it was my time. I thought ‘this is it.’ ” He went on with his day because this is a quotidian experience for black people who dare to drive.
    Each time I get in my car, I make sure I have my license, registration and insurance cards. I make sure my seatbelt is fastened. I place my cellphone in the handless dock. I check and double check and triple check these details because when (not if) I get pulled over, I want there to be no doubt that I am following the letter of the law. I do this knowing it doesn’t really matter if I am following the letter of the law or not. Law enforcement officers see only the color of my skin, and in the color of my skin they see criminality, deviance, a lack of humanity...
    As a larger, very tall woman, I am sometimes mistaken for a man. I don’t want to be “accidentally” killed for being a black man. I hate that such a thought even crosses my mind. This is the reality of living in this black body. This is my reality of black womanhood, living in a world where I am stripped of my femininity and humanity because of my unruly black body."

   The above was an excerpt written by author Roxane Gay from her Op Ed piece in last Saturday’s New York Times. The subject of Ms. Gay’s article was the death two weeks ago of Sandra Bland, the   young black woman who was pulled over by a Texas state trooper for failure to use a turn signal and who, for arguing with the trooper, was threatened with a taser, pushed to the ground, kneed in the back, and thrown into jail on $5,000 bail. Three days later Sandra Bland committed suicide in her jail cell.
    Reading Ms. Gay’s editorial hurt my heart.   Because all I can think about is what if one of my daughters were pulled over for a nothing of a traffic violation, roughed up, physically hurt and put in jail?   What if my son were pulled over one day on his way to work and accused of being a criminal and scared to within an inch of his life? What if it were one of my daughters who was afraid each time she got into her car that she might be stopped by the police and mistreated?   What if it were my daughter who feared that because she was  larger and taller than most women she might one day be mistaken for a man by a police officer and shot?
    And what if my children, college educated professionals just as Roxane Gay and her brother are and as Sandra Bland was, went through life feeling themselves in the sights of law enforcement officers who see in them only, in Ms Gay's words, "criminality, deviance, a lack of humanity".
    And what if I, their mother, were helpless to protect them or calm their fears because I lived under the same specter of potential humiliation and danger as my children?
    All my "what if's" are facts of life for African American mothers.
    But what can a 63-year-old white woman whose heart aches for her black sisters and their children do about it?

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Thinking Ahead

7/24/2015

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This book was given to me by one of my Posse members. It's a good read.

       From the reading I’ve done on aging, and from my fellow Baby Boomers who’ve dealt with the trials and tribulations of dealing with their very old parents, and from what I can now see on the horizon for my own 95-year-old mother, I’ve come to one conclusion: If you ‘re not taken down by an accident or by cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, or some other predatory cause-of-death disease, if you keep plugging along pretty well through the years into your eighties. nineties, or beyond, slowed down by nothing more than the enfeebling wear-and-tear of time, then you will spend your final days in a nursing home (which is, by the way, not the same as an assisted living facility).
     I also know that your mind is likely to reach the finish line before your body does.
    And I predict that though in your 60's you may have assured your children that you've made financial arrangements to deal with the cost of your long term care and that you fully intend to move into a nursing facility when the time comes, 25 years later when the time actually comes you'll have to be unhappily coerced into leaving your home after a bitter battle with your distressed, stressed-out and guilt-ridden children towards whom you still harbor some resentment for having taken away your car keys.
    I've made the I'll-give-up-driving-and-go-to-the-nursing-home-when-my-time-comes speech to my own children, and yet now I wonder: if I last into greatly advanced years will I really behave much differently than most other people who've lasted into greatly advanced years?
    Looking forward to that eventuality, I've already apologized in advance to my children for any grief or heartache I may give them when I'm very old. I've given them my permission to take away my car keys and do what they need to do to arrange for my late-life care no matter how I protest. I only hope I don't give them too much trouble.
    It seems that a parent who had a harsh or difficult streak when they were younger sometimes becomes doubly, triply, quadruply difficult to deal with when they're old, especially when in the grip of dementia. I've even heard of parents who were good-natured and nice all their lives turning mean when their mind begins making its escape. I hope I don't become that way. But I've likewise asked my children's forgiveness if I ever turn mean to them when my mind is no longer my own.
    I know we can't control how we'll be when our personalities have been taken over by dementia, but I do have a vision of how I'd like to be.
    Last week I was in Seaford, Delaware visiting my mother, who's currently in a rehab center recovering from a fall (see yesterday's post),   The center also has a nursing home section which I passed through every day on my way to my mom's section. Every day by the nurses' station there sat three women next to each other in their wheel chairs, each one holding a new-born baby doll.   Two of the three chatted like young mothers in the park, bouncing and cuddling their babies.
    But the third always sat quietly and unmoving as a statue, her doll caressed close against her chest, her eyes closed and her lips pressed against the doll's head.
    When I saw this woman it hit me that if and when the time comes that my mind has left and settled into a new place, I want it to be the place where this woman is: I want to become a mother giving her baby's head a long loving kiss, breathing in that wonderful newborn smell, frozen in an endless moment of maternal bliss.
    There are worse places a mind can be.

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The Secret Of Youth

7/23/2015

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Last Thursday Tom and I drove 10 hours from Columbus to Seaford, Delaware, to visit my 95-year-old mother.
My mom recently took a fall from which she is now recovering in a rehab center where she is, in her usual way, making the best of adversity.

    In the two weeks she's been at the center my mom has managed to make friends with her room mate, the staff, and everyone on her floor. She rolls down the hallway greeting the residents and caressing the hands of those who can't speak. Some put out their hand out for her to take as she passes by. She wheels into the dining room and introduces me to her friends. She's the person whose table everybody wants to sit at, though she now has her Posse with whom she usually sits at meals.
    I heard my mother, herself a nurse, in a physical therapy session telling the therapist of her disapproval of the staff asking the patients their level of pain before administering pain meds. "You have to give the patient the meds an hour before the typical onset time of pain," she said, "and not wait until they're already at 7 or 8."   One of the administrators turned to me and said to me with a wink, "Oh, these nurses are the worst patients!"
    But the staff member was joking.
    In fact I was informed what a good patient my mother has been at her physical therapy, compliant, hard-working, pushing herself to do whatever she's asked. She's anxious to walk again.

One day during my stay at my mother's house I was perusing her living room shelf,

...where I found some old photograph albums which I brought along on my next visit.

Among the albums I'd found one dating back to my mother's time as an army nurse in Puerto Rico during World War II.

She still remembers the names of some of her fellow medical personnel.

That's my mom in the photos below.

The best moment with the photo albums came while we were looking through some photos of a cruise my parents took about 20 years ago. My mom pointed to a photo of herself wearing a wide-brimmed purple hat decorated with big pink and blue paper roses.

    She could barely stop laughing enough to explain that one day one of the activities for the ladies on board was a hat-decorating contest.   Everyone was given a hat and some decorating supplies, but my mom had her own vision. She snuck off to the ladies' lounge and pilfered a couple handfuls of the pearly-pink-and-blue-wrapped sanitary napkins. Actually she left the pads and took only the wrappings which she fashioned into lovely paper roses then glued to her hat.
    My mom won the contest.
    But, she said, someone swiped the hat. I told her I bet it was the maintenance staff who wanted the wrappings back for the sanitary napkins.
    Nothing like a good laugh to keep you young.

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Good-Bye, Trees

7/21/2015

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The end of our street where it runs into Hamilton Road and the face tree.

Hamilton Road is a 25-mile stretch that runs north-south through Franklin County, Ohio, and dead-ends a few miles north of Gahanna.
Though it is for the most part a busy thoroughfare as it bisects Columbus and the contiguous suburbs, by the time Hamilton Road reaches my neighborhood in Gahanna it's a fairly bucolic road

lined with trees and houses with deep front lawns.

...Or rather it was until the construction equipment arrived a few weeks ago and began clogging up the traffic,

gouging out the lawns,

...and cutting down the trees.

Soon in place of the trees and lawns we’ll have a brand-new state-of-the art 5-lane highway. Is there enough traffic on this stretch of Hamilton Road to warrant a 5-lane highway? No, but after all, roads are made by fools like we,

though I expect there will be plenty of traffic once the new apartment complex is finished,

...and the remaining houses and yards have been bought up, torn down and replaced by stores, office buildings,

...and cars.

    There was a time we thought we could keep this day from ever coming, when we thought we could save Hamilton Road. Sadly, that time has passed.
    But we did fight hard and long.
    In fact, it was just about 20 years ago when the residents of our neighborhood, a Gahanna subdivision known as Foxboro, were informed that the perfectly adequate two-lane section of Hamilton Road that connected our subdivision to everywhere else was going to be widened to 5 lanes.
    And so the people of Foxboro grumbled, grouched and kvetched until one person decided to step up and organize an effort to stop the 5-lane widening of Hamilton Road.

That person was Tom Liszkay.

Tom motivated the residents to attend city council meetings and make their voices heard. He ran off flyers to keep the neighborhood informed and updated about the status of the Central Hamilton Road Project, as it was called, and to announce times and dates of upcoming city council and planning commission meetings. He recruited me, our children, and our neighbors to walk house to house handing out the flyers to and answering questions of the residents of Foxboro.
He bought a mailbox which he spray-painted white and set our front porch as a drop-box so that people could pick up updates and leave any questions or communications they had for Tom.

The old white mailbox is now rusted with age but still used occasionally as a message drop-box by friends and neighbors.

    Meanwhile Tom became a friendly nuisance down at Gahanna City Hall and, good-natured, sociable, and savvy guy that he is, was soon on cordial terms with - if on the opposing side of- the city engineer as well as the mayor, members of city council, the zoning board and the planning commission.
   These grass-roots efforts succeeded in getting the Central Hamilton Road Project delayed for almost 10 years.
   But 10 years is too long to keep fighting the same battle. By the end people had gotten tired of the fight , grew resigned, gave up, gave in, moved away, died. In the end Tom was fighting a battle with a handful of loyal troops, and in the end we lost on a Monday evening when the Gahanna City Council cast the final vote to widen Hamilton Road to five lanes.
   So finally we all laid down our arms and went home to await the inevitable.
    Which didn’t happen right away.
    Maybe it was funding issues, the onset of the recession, bureaucratic slog, or something else, but after the climax of that city council vote there was a 10-year denouement during which nothing was done to our section of Hamilton Road, so that after a while those residents of Foxboro who still cared ceased wondering when the construction would start. We went on with our lives in our quiet neighborhood, dropped the Central Hamilton Road Project from our collective radar,

...and forgot that the lovely trees lining Hamilton Road were merely enjoying a prolonged stay of execution.

That is to say we forgot until last year when the heavy construction began on a new apartment complex in a cleared field a block from my street. And then last month the flyer was distributed throughout Foxboro informing us of the upcoming starting date of the widening of Hamilton Road.

Now here we are.

It's enough to make a Lorax cry.

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Celebrating Love And Laughter

7/16/2015

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...Continued from yesterday:

Matt and Suzie's wedding celebration was held at the Virginia Museum of Transportation in downtown Roanoke.

The festivities began at 5:00, at which time we were invited to tour the museum,

...converse,

...nosh on the delicious hors d'oeuvres, shrimp, roasted potatoes in aioli sauce and sausages in puff pastry,

...and, of course, fuss over the happy, soon-to-be-married couple.

It was during this time I learned that flaming doughnut holes really were on the dessert menu (see post from 7/2/2015), and I chatted a with the chef,

who showed me the ingredients and explained how the doughnut holes would be coated in a brown-sugar-butter sauce then set aflame with rum. Yum!

The dining room was set amidst the classic car display.

Perhaps as a reference to Suzie's job as book editor for the The Roanoke Times, the table decorations were books: romance novels with all the faces on the covers replaced with photos of Suzie and Matt.

And the favors were book marks.

When the moment arrived all the guests were called into the wedding hall where we gathered around Suzie and Matt, attended by their parents and brothers.

    Matt's parents Joe and Debbie, his brother Joseph, Matt, Suzie, Suzie's brother Antony, and her parents Peter and Amy.

    The ceremony was only a few minutes, but it was beautiful, heartfelt, and moving.
    At one point the minister explained that Matt and Suzie had opted not to exchange rings, that they would instead continue to exchange inside jokes, laughter, and love.
    The ceremony ended with the simple words, "Matt and Suzie are now married."

And it was clear that here were two youngsters who had given their hearts to each other long ago.

Their joy filled the room and love - and laughter - was in the air.

And it was contagious. Claire and Miguel, moved by the wedding and discovering the museum display of railroad tracks, felt inspired to recreate one of their own wedding photos taken on a railroad track in Arizona.

Then began the feast.

    The out-of-this world food was served at food stations.
    Sliders and shoe string fries:

Shrimp and grits with all the fixings:

Asian noodle & steamed bun station:

Yummy lemonades:

And drinks:

And, of course, the piece de la resistance:

The resulting doughnut holes were hot and unbelievably delicious, and were served with sides of ice cream, flan, and mini fruit tarts.
Those were some heavenly holes!
And joy of joys, the doughnut hole bar stayed open all evening,

...while we danced,

...and danced,

...and got silly in the photo booth:

...and danced some more:

It was one beautiful wedding.

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Walking And Eating Around Roanoke

7/15/2015

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...Continued From Yesterday:
Matt and Suzie's wedding celebration was to begin at 5pm Saturday, which gave us most of the day to see the sights around Roanoke.

Though there was a nice-looking breakfast bar available in the hotel lobby cafe,

Tom, Tommy, Claire, Miguel and I decided to head back downtown to a cute-looking breakfast place we’d passed the evening before with a promising-sounding name,

Scrambled By Choice.

Evidently everyone in Roanoke had the same idea as us. The place was jammed and we were told there was a15-minute wait.

As we were already there we opted to wait.

In retrospect, we concluded that we’d probably have fared better seeking nourishment elsewhere.

After our wait the five of us were jammed against a wall into a table for four.

We waited forever for our food, except for Miguel who waited forever-and-a-half, as his breakfast didn’t arrive until the rest of us had finished ours.
And for all that, the food was nothing to write home about.

The home fries were definitely from the freezer,

...and the consensus was that the scrambled eggs could have been from a powdered mix.

The French toast was good, though.

And the server did bring us an extra order of French toast as an apology. Or maybe it was by mistake. It was probably by mistake. Anyway, none of us could see what the draw of this slow, crowded, mediocre-food breakfast place was. Oh well, maybe it’s a Roanoke tradition.
After breakfast Tom and I parted ways with Tommy, Claire, and Miguel, who decided to walk around Mill Mountain,

which is the mountain that creates the beautiful view seen from our hotel (see yesterday’s post).

Tom and I headed back downtown because I was curious about the provenance of a palatial Tudor-style building high on a hill that dominates part of the downtown skyline.

Turns out this building is the Roanoke Hotel and Conference Center.

After doing a once-around the building we decided to head up Mill Mountain,

...where we ran into Tommy, Claire, and Miguel at the overlook

Then we headed down the mountain,

..back to downtown Roanoke,

....where Miguel and Claire sought out some ice cream,

,,,then met up with the rest of us at the Shiska Mediterranean Grill,

...which establishment I'd glanced into the night before and spotted folks noshing on the most magnificent-looking slices of pizza I'd ever seen, and so I now had my mind set upon procuring one of those splendid slices for myself and my loved ones.
And so procure we did.

Check out the gargantuosity of that slice! $4 for the pepperoni,

...and $3 for the cheese. Tommy had wanted to order two slices, but the server told him, no, you only want one. He was right, of course.

The pizza was New York-style-foldable and it was delicious, as was the side of chicken hummus we shared:

After our snack of pizza and hummus Tommy, Miguel and Claire headed back to the hotel while Tom and I walked around the City Market section of downtown.

From the City Market we walked a few blocks

to the old Norfolk & Western railroad yard

Then we headed back to our hotel

to get ready for the wedding.

To be continued...

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Squirrel Nut Zippers, Chunkies, And Other Gustatory Delights

7/14/2015

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...such as sweet & salty toasted crickets.

...Continued from yesterday:
So then, after having feasted on the delicious rehearsal dinner,

we the wedding guests were invited on a walk of several blocks across downtown Roanoke on this warm, lovely Friday evening,

...until we reached our destination:

An old fashioned candy store called, appropriately, The Candy Store.

The Candy Store carries old-time vintage brands of candies, the yummy treats folks of my generation grew up with and could sing all the TV commercials for:

Our host, my brother Joe, invited us all to act like kids in a candy store, his treat.

We did, indeed.

Tom with Amy, mother of the bride.

Any of you Baby Boomers remember "smoking" candy cigarettes?

How about Fizzies?

There was much excitement among us Boomers over the discovery of the Chunkies,

...though my personal childhood favorite was the Skybar, or rather the white-filled square of the Skybar. I'd eat only the white-filled unit then try to push the rest off on somebody else.

There were a few offerings at the The Candy Store that I'd never heard of:

..as well as the toasted crickets, which I guess I'd heard of, but didn't think actually existed.

And there were some fancier treats as well:

After we'd all filled our goodie bags to our hearts' content some of us strolled around downtown Roanoke for a bit longer, munching along the way.

What a sweet night!

To be continued...

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Wonderful Prelude To A Wonderful Wedding

7/13/2015

4 Comments

On Friday Tom, Tommy and I drove from Columbus to Roanoke, Virginia.

for the wonderful, wonderful wedding of my nephew Matt and his sweet fiancee Suzie,

...senders of the memorable "Save The Date" (See post from 7/2/2015),

Matt and Suzie had arranged superwonderful accommodations for the guests at the Cambria Suites, located on the outskirts of downtown Roanoke.

The lobby:

Our rooms were beautiful and spacious and were divided into a sleeping area,

... and a sitting area,

...and had two televisions, one across from the bed and one in this cozy tv-watching nook,

...and a stylin' bathroom.

After we settled into our rooms we met up with a few relatives in the lobby.

Here's Tom, Tommy, and my brother Joe, father of Matt, the groom-to-be,

...and my brother Michael outside the hotel with Amy and Jo, the youngest of his 10 children.

We all set out for the rehearsal dinner at Martin's, a restaurant in the lovely historic area of downtown Roanoke known as the Market District.

My brother Joe and my sister-in-law Debbie, parents of the groom, reserved half the restaurant for the out-of town wedding guests.

It was a happy reunion of siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandchildren, grandparents, and old friends.

Debbie, mother of the groom

We met up at the restaurant with Claire and Miguel who flew in from Chicago, here with Suzie and Matt.

Miguel, Claire, Tommy, my brother Jim, and Tom.

The food was delicious and served as a beautifully presented buffet

…of pulled pork with the softest, freshest buns,

…grilled chicken skewers wrapped in bacon,

…macaroni and cheese,

... .baked beans, assorted salads, and

assorted brownies and bars.

But the real fun, the kind of fun portended in Matt and Suzie’s whimsical "Save-The-Date", began after the dinner when all the guests were invited for a stroll from the restaurant through downtown Roanoke to a special destination.

 To be continued...

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Maybe everybody better take Piano Lessons

7/9/2015

4 Comments

    There was an article in the Columbus Dispatch a couple of days ago on how peoples' need to memorize facts - and subsequently their ability to memorize - is being decimated by the internet.   Anything we need to know is now stored on our computer or in our phone so we don't bother to memorize the things people used to have to memorize - phone numbers, for example - and so our ability to remember things is slipping into a state of atrophy. On the other hand, thanks to our computers we've become better at finding things that we used to have to store in our brains, our computers having become an extension of our brain, storing our memory for us.
    Which is really cool in a sci-fi kind of way.
    Until the computer crashes or somehow loses or deletes our electronic memory, leaving us with a brain memory so flabby that without our digital photos to send a message from our robust optic nerve to our cerebellum we can't recall what our dear old mom looks like.
    So I guess the current dilemma is, now that nobody's memorizing phone numbers or addresses or multiplication tables or state capitals or names of presidents or what the people they know and the places they've been look like anymore, how do we keep our memory skills sharp?
    Here's my suggestion: everybody take piano lessons.
    Which sounds funny coming from me, not because I'm a piano teacher, but because whenever a parent tells me that it's been proven that taking piano lessons ups a child's math skills, I respond that I can't guarantee any outcome from piano lessons other than that, if the student practices well and follows my instructions, the student will become a good pianist.
    Bit of a snarky response on my part, I know, but I'll admit that I'm ever-so-slightly bugged by the inference that the music itself is not important enough a reason to take music lessons unless it's linked to a more utilitarian end, such as improved math skills.
    But in light of this latest discovery I'm now wondering if perhaps piano lessons should not be widely promoted for the welfare of internet memory-dwindled humanity.
    Because taking piano lessons involves beaucoup memorization.

There are the scales and chords, finger exercises, ear-training pieces, key signatures, musical terms, theory, key names, note names, which note is played on which piano key, learned ultimately by repetition, repetition, repetition,

...brain memory, finger muscle memory, sight memory, ear memory all in play.

And so when the internet goes down, the blue screen pops up, all the memory stored in the electronic brain is lost and we're scrambling to remember whether we had a lunch date Tuesday at 12:30 or a soccer game Thursday at 6:45, some fortunates out there will have the fall back of

a memory amply fit and toned by the mastery and performance of their piano pieces. And that's memory that can be stored nowhere but in a human brain.

References
"Internet Erases Our Need To Memorize", Andrea Peterson, The Washington Post, The Columbus Dispatch, July 6, 2015

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