“The Circle”s of Life

You all know the place. You use to go there every Friday night. Every town in the US had this place… the place where all the high school kids hung out and all kinds of shenanigans were committed or initiated before they moved to other undisclosed locations.

The town I grew up in had several of these places…The Circle, Tuck’s BarBQ, Waterfront Park, and the mall parking lot across from McDonald’s were the main ones. The one I hung out at was The Circle. I believe it is still in business even today. But back then, there was no curbing at the highway and the parking lot was dirt and somehow it seemed we could get 60 cars in an area that was designed to accommodate 40 at best. You didn’t want to get there too early or you may get your car caught up in the middle and not be able to get out any time soon. But you didn’t want to be too late either because you may miss something!!

We would show up in the parking lot with our beer (yet, most of us were underage but did it really matter?) and would sit on the hoods / trunks of our cars and talking about who was dating who, who was running around on who, who was going to get in a fight with their best friend over something so important that it was… well, over nothing at all actually. The local police knew EXACTLY what was going on (since they had done this when they were younger too) so when they would come by, they would slow way down, put their windows down and listen and sometimes stop and talk with us. We would all make some lame attempt to try to hide the beer we were drinking, like they didn’t know we were drinking. They would just smile and wave and keep moving as long as we were “behaving”.

So after a while we had heard all the stories there were to hear and drank all the beer there was to drink, we would pile into car and head out to find more beer, more stories and more shenanigans. How in the world we survived those days continue to amaze me. I would never want to go back to those days of insecurities and basic drunken stupidity but I’m kinda glad I have them in my memory.

The ties that bind

Since I retired I have been spending a fair amount of time revisiting certain aspects of my career. Something I noticed in my closet the other day were neckties. You may be familiar with these remnant pieces of cloth that men use to wear around our necks on a daily basis. I bet I have close to a hundred of these things… various lengths, various widths, various colors.

I haven’t added any new items to this inventory in a long, long time. When I first started my working career, you would never show up at the office without a tie on. There were many days I was involved in activities that were really not that conducive to wearing a tie to accomplish, but it was a definite part of the uniform of the day.

Eventually “casual Fridays” appeared and as time continued to pass eventually open collars became the norm. Not sure ties will ever come back the way they were back in the day but in a weird way I miss those days. Specifically, I miss one tie. It was my tie of rebellion. I’ve included a couple of pictures of it here. It looks pretty much like any other tie you might see as a part of an outfit. But if you look really close there are a couple things you will notice. About halfway down you can see Mickey Mouse’s eyes and nose… and further down, you can see a reclining Goofy.

There were days that I would be sitting in meetings that would get a bit tense and realize I had that tie on and laugh to myself… Quite often things aren’t as serious as we make them out to be. Everyone needs a little reclining Goofy in their lives.