Rantings and Ravings

By Sun Advocate

I went to start a new painting and I couldn’t find my water jar for cleaning my brushes. It was just an old mayo jar, but I have used it for over 20 years.
It wasn’t perfect, a little too deep really, but it chronicled the many paintings I have done over the years. Layers of paint on it spoke of things past. It survived two houses, three dogs, one cat, two kids and countless hours of my life. It is a mystery where it went.
That got me thinking back to other things that are no longer around either. Remember lawn darts? You can’t find them any more. I guess they are one of those items that are too dangerous for our kids to have.
They were pretty wicked. My brother hit me in the back with one in the summer of 1971 when I beat him for the fifth time in a row and then taunted him. I had a painful bruise that lasted for weeks square in the middle of my back, but I survived.
Yellow braddish is something else you don’t see much of. Braddish was something unique to mining country. It was used in the mines for temporary air stops and it seemed like every household in the county had some when I first moved here in the late 1980’s.
People used it to cover stuff in their yards or make cheap garage doors in the winter months. It was seen in alfalfa fields and in the back of pick-up trucks. It was every where. But now its not.
Glass pop bottles are another thing you no longer see. Pop bottles were a great way of making money when I was a kid. You could get 10 cents a bottle. My brother and I would take off on our bikes with our double wire baskets on the back of them and cruise the roads for those discarded treasures.
We would take them to the store and cash them in and then spend at least half of the booty on candy and comic books before heading home with the rest of the cash. We could save up five dollars easily in a weekend, big money in those days.
Now you can save aluminum cans, but it takes a huge amount to get much money from this. It isn’t worth our kids time to go out and collect cans on a weekend. They don’t even bother to pick up a dropped penny or nickel any more.
So I wasted several hours thinking about things that used to be. Yeah the good old days of the past. Phones connected to the wall, rubber boots that always leaked before winter was over, cars that had a hard time starting in the cold, eight track players, and black and white TV with three fuzzy networks if you were lucky.
Nothing in life is stagnant. I guess I will find another jar to use for my brushes. I will use a little more shallow one that works better and doesn’t soak the brush handles.
It was just a stupid mayo jar, but I miss it.