Things you think about when you’re me.
You know what I would love to have been able to do?
Talk to my parents now, at this age when they were this age. They were (of course) always considerably older than I was (at any age!) but I often think about how interesting it would be to meet on the same age-related playing field and see how we matched up. Since I’m making all this up, I get to make it be that they would still have been born in 1927 and 1930 respectively, and I would still have been born in 1957, but somehow we’d all be the same age at the same time, and would sit down in the living room (of the house I grew up in) and talk about stuff – our views of the world, of people, of politics, everything. I wouldn’t be needing to take care of them, and they wouldn’t see me as a young’un; we’d just be able to talk and to share like regular people and see what we think about things.
Wouldn’t that be interesting to do? (Or am I just weird as heck?)
Don’t answer that.
But see? I’d get to interview them for my podcast!
Since I can’t do that, I’ll interview other people I find interesting, and this week our guest is a young person that I’ve known since before they were born, a young friend of mine named Nine. We’re not giving last names in this world of social media and what people sometimes do with information, but I found this interview to be absolutely fascinating in the world of what it is like to be a young person in the world today. Nine is extremely articulate, and we dive deeply into all the years when they were in the middle-teen phase, trying to sort the world out – and how they finally did!
Every generation looks at the young ones, shakes their heads and says, “Kids today! Why do they do the things they do? Why do they make it so hard on themselves?” Nine tells us all of it from a perspective that is both from the inside and now, on the outside and it is fascinating.
If you are trying to finagle life with a teenager, or even if you aren’t, Nine’s explanations and observations about this generation of kids who were born shortly after the turn of this last century will make you say, “Wow.” (I wish my parents were here to hear it!)
You can find it at www.Nanlandia.com, or where ever you get your podcasts! We are REAL!
And – y’all in Elmer’s Land: (I got a lot of emails this past week from people interested in Elmer’s updates – Elmer’s Store being the restaurant I owned from 2005 to 2018 in Ashfield, Massachusetts) – we have 27 days to raise the money we need to buy the store outright. Twenty-seven, and we need to raise $82,000 in those twenty-seven days. That’s $3037 a day, and I’m feeling good about the fact that we can do it! (Can we do it? Yes, we can! Remember those days?)
That’s the money we need to buy the building ---- we had started out raising money for all of this back in the fall, and then it got a little confusing with the prospect that the building would be auctioned off to the highest bidder. Then the auction got postponed twice, and so we stepped back a little from the whole fund-raising part as we waited to see what was going to happen next.
Well sir, Andreas turned around and sold the building back to the bank, and the bank then came to us and said, “Okay! We got it!” We had been telling them for a while that we really wanted to buy it and re-establish Elmer’s as a community hub again, and, being a community-minded bank, Greenfield Savings Bank saw us as a positive ingredient in this community! So here we are, all working together to buy this 188 year-old community hub and make it perk again!
And we TRULY need your help! (Even if you don’t live in Ashfield - You could always go!)
Help us raise $3037 per day for the next 27 days by mailing us a check to
The Ashfield Revitalization Fund
PO Box 334
Ashfield, MA 01330
Or you can visit our GoFundMe page at Fundraiser for Ariel Brooks by Elizabeth Gray : Elmer's Revitalization (gofundme.com)
If we aren’t able to buy the building, we’ll give you your money back, so there is in fact nothing to lose! (We buy it and you get your community restaurant back! If we aren’t able to buy it you get your money back! You win all the way around!)
But now is the time to do it, so we can make this community dream a reality!
Wait – let’s add some grammar to that:
Let’s make this community dream a reality! (Dream as a noun, community as the adjective)
Let’s make this community dream a reality. (Dream as a verb, community as the noun) And as the community dreams about it, it becomes a noun of reality!
Don’t you wish you had been an English teacher too? You could be as weird as I am! (But I do have fun!)
