Front Porch Wisdom

Lessons that I learned from members of the Greatest Generation, while sitting on the front porch, and just listening.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Well, hello, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to this episode of the Amazing Journey Podcast. I'm your host, Mike. I'm very grateful that you decided to tune in and spend some time with me. We're going to spend around the next 30 minutes talking about some of the things that I've learned along the way, my amazing journey in life. It really is a fantastic time to be alive. It's been a wonderful time to grow up and get to where we've gotten to in the present day. I've learned so many things. And I just want to share some of what I've learned with you. If you're in a similar age demographic, perhaps you can relate. If you're a bit younger than I am, perhaps you can take some of the things that I've learned and convert my knowledge into your wisdom. For those that might be unclear as to the difference, knowledge is gained when I learn from my mistakes, and wisdom is gained from when you learn from my mistakes. So hopefully you gain some wisdom with some of the things that I'm going to be discussing here in the next 30 minutes. I have a very uh eclectic taste when it comes to music. I like just about everything. I try to appreciate the artistic talent and the creativity that went into it. I will announce my biases up front. I I love the late 60s, 70s, 80s, early 90s, the classic rock era. It's when I came of age as a man, and a lot of those memories associated with those songs in that time period are very precious to me. I do enjoy music from the 50s. I do enjoy some big band, and I do enjoy some things post-2000 as well. So moving forward, we're going to start every episode with just a few recommendations, uh, songs that you can download on your laptop, on your tablet, on your iPhone, and can hopefully get as much joy out of if you haven't heard them before as I have. And if you have heard them, maybe you haven't thought about them in the while, and that will bring you some joy too. The first one that I listened to recently brought me back uh to 19, the early 1980s. I want to say it was 1981, was Heart Like a Wheel by the Steve Miller Band. I've always enjoyed uh Steve Miller's guitar playing. It's one of the best concerts I've ever seen. Uh his opening act didn't show up one time, and he played for just under three hours by himself. It was quite remarkable. So Heart Like a Wheel, Steve Miller Band. The second one is a classic from the the high point of the disco era, and that is Don't Go Breaking My Heart by Elton John and Kiki D. What a catchy beat. And I remember when that came out, I lived in a very small city, and I would watch um all the young ladies in the neighborhood that were getting ready to go out on their dates on Friday and Saturday nights. They all had their uh FM radios, which believe it or not were still fairly new. They hadn't been around uh 10 years yet, and they would have that on and maybe they would be moving and grooving in their front yards waiting for their dates to pull up in their respective muscle cars and pick them up and have a have a great night going out dancing. And then the third one um is a classic that came into mind uh recently um because of a of a movie that I was watching on one of the streaming platforms, uh, and that is I Wanna Rock by Twisted Sister, the classic from 1984. Uh Twisted Sister was uh they were something else when they first came on, a big hair band. They they did their makeup prettier than most uh most women that I had seen at that point in my life. But uh what a classic, what a classic rock anthem. So I hope those three will give you some incentive to look them up on Spotify or Apple Music or YouTube or wherever you get your music these days. Um all three songs put a smile on my face, and I hope that they put a smile on yours as well. One of the the next thing that I had wanted to talk to all of you about tonight is what I'm gonna call front porch wisdom. It's one of the things that I miss the most about my youth and one of the most formative things for me along my amazing journey in life. My grandmother lived in a very old house in a small working-class city. And the city was 12 blocks long by 26 blocks wide. And her house was situated right next to some railroad tracks. And back then, in the part of the country where I grew up, the Delaware and Hudson Railroad had trains going by her house at least a dozen times a day, all times a day and night. And you got used to the noise when you stayed over. When I first started staying over at my grandmother's house, I had a hard time sleeping as the trains rumbled through. But as I got older, you didn't even notice it. And it and it prepared me for the part of my journey later on in life when I was stationed overseas, and my quarters were about 150 yards off the end of an international runway that also ran 24 hours. And every 90 seconds you heard the roar of jet engines, and I could sleep through that. So um, I can sleep through pretty much anything. That's that's another one of the gifts that I've been given along the way. But it all started in that house next to the railroad tracks, and my grandmother's house had a very large front porch on it. And my grandmother was of the Rosie the Riveter generation. She was born in 1921. She came of age in the Great Depression. Um, she lost her father when she was in single digits. My great-grandmother buried her husband, and then three weeks later had her youngest child, raised six children all by herself. There was no public assistance back then. So great-grandma kept her family together, kept everybody fed and clothed and chewed by taking in other people's laundry and cleaning people's houses until the early 1960s, when she was able to get a job with the city and uh be a cook up at the high school. And it was a very, very hard life and very, very hard times. And when I I look at the enormity of what great grandma had to deal with, and then by default, what grandma had to deal with, uh, I'm very humbled. It's very difficult for me to complain about anything in my life, even though I've gone through my own struggles. But the best part about my grandmother's house was her front porch. And I always had the end seat that was closest to the yard and the railroad tracks, and my grandmother would sit next to me. Uh her friend from down a road, sort of kitty corner from her Jane would sit next to grandma, and then Frank and Fran would sit next to next next in line, and then my Aunt Gertrude and Uncle Jake would come and sit next to Frank and Fran, and then you would have Joe and Agnes from across the street. They would kind of one would sit on the steps and inevitably the other one would sit with a lawn chair facing us. And the I guess I could call it the front porch ministry started around the end of April when things started to warm up a little bit. Um, and then they would come down after supper, somewhere between five and six o'clock, and they would stay maybe half an hour to an hour after it got dark, as as the days got longer, they would stay out longer. And there were times around the summer solstice in June or the 4th of July. I can remember being out on that front porch until almost 11 o'clock at night. And I learned more from listening to my grandmother and her friends than I ever did in school or working on an undergraduate degree in college or working on a graduate degree at a university. Um, and these are some of the things that I learned. The first is to grow your own food. Uh Frank and Fran live next door to my grandmother, and they had a very small backyard. And just about the entire backyard was a fruit and vegetable garden. Um Frank was a retired factory worker, and he was always doing something in that garden. I can remember Christmases during the winter when there might not have been a lot of snow on the ground. He was out laying compost over the top of the dirt on Christmas morning. And I remember asking him, you know, why are you always in that garden? And he said, during the Great Depression, people were starving. They didn't have the supermarkets that they have today. And everything came to a grinding, screeching halt. And he said, if you didn't grow your own food during the good growing season and you didn't can it and you didn't figure out how to preserve it, then there were times you didn't eat. And as a young boy, that just really blew my mind. I could not wrap my arms around that. I just couldn't. But as I grew up and I went into the military and I was gone for 20 years, I had the chance to visit five continents. And what I saw there reminded me of what Frank had said that you grow your own food. Because if you count on somebody else all the time to provide it for you, A, you may not have it when times get hard. And B, you don't know how they pre, you know, they prepare the soil and the fertilizers they use, are they natural and organic or are they straight up poisoned? And I remember thinking that Frank was 40 years ahead of his time in his thinking. And to this day, I'm blessed to have a backyard where part of it turns into a garden, and and the best produce that I eat is the produce that comes out of my garden. The second thing that I learned was to repurpose and recycle. Now, recycling came into being, it became popular in the early 90s, where I grew up in the United States. But my grandmother and all of the other members of the congregation of the front porch ministry, they were repurposing and recycling as a way of life before it became cool. There were never any glass jars or plastic containers that were thrown out into my grandmother's garbage. And I can remember being down at my grandmother's house when the garbage would be put out the next day. And there really wasn't a lot of stuff in her garbage. All containers or jars or whatever were washed out with hot water and soap. They were rinsed, they were dried just like you would your dishes after you ate. And they were, you peeled the labels off of them, and she would store tea bags, or she would store sugar or salt or whatever. Um her male friends would take those and they those jars, those containers, and they would put nails and screws and other things in their workshops. Umspapers were saved. She had a neighbor who, well, today we would probably call him a hoarder, but he compulsively saved newspapers. And found out after interviewing one of the neighbors next door that, you know, during the depression, that man would go up and down the street and collect the newspapers and collect rags. They would collect anything that could be scrapped. And newspapers were extremely useful because when folks couldn't afford to get their shoes repaired, they would wad up a newspaper, and the newspaper would cover up the hole in the shoe where the sole used to be. And that way your foot wouldn't get a blister from rubbing on the sidewalk or the cobblestone or the concrete. Because people couldn't just uh afford to go buy new shoes. There was no payless shoe shop. There was no Amazon Prime with you know clearance deals. So newspapers were invaluable. Joe, who would sit on the step, usually had said he knew people back then during the depression who would take the newspapers and put them just underneath the sheet in bed. He said you couldn't get quilts or or blankets, there just weren't any. So you went to bed with what sheets you had, you put the newspapers in there, and you threw your overcoat or your jacket, and that's what kept you warm during the winter, because there wasn't any money for coal, and you had to ration it so that you kept the pipes and the house warm so that they didn't freeze and burst because nobody had any money to fix them. So as I said, the repurposing and the recycling, they were doing it before it became in vogue. The next thing that I learned from the congregation on the front porch was to learn how to fix things. And I grew up at a time when there were things that men were expected to know how to do, like check oil in a car and change tires, and there were things that women were expected to know, such as how to bake a cake or a loaf of bread, and how to mend socks or or sew a button on a shirt that popped off. And I remember that the ladies that sat on that front porch said, Michael, you need to know how to do all this. Things are changing. You have to know how to sew, you need to know how to make a basic repair, you need to know how to cook. You need to know how to bake, you need to know how to can. You need to know how to garden. Because things are changing. This was before Title IX came into place, you know, in full force. But these folks had the wisdom sitting on the front porch because they had lived. And my grandmother neighbor, Jane, had said when all the men went off to fight World War II, we had to go take their place. There was a ball bearing factory not far from where they lived. Those ball bearings were crucial in the war effort. And so they had to know how to keep a house and look after any kids that were in school, but those women had to go to work and they they had to learn how to check oil and keep machinery running. At a time when society had said no, a woman's job was to have a family and maintain the home. So they had lived through the Great Depression, World War II, the Korean conflict, and then Vietnam with all of the social and societal changes that we went through in this country in the United States. And the lesson of learning to fix things was more than just something tangible like changing a tire or you know, learning how to fix the toasters so that you could make toast in the morning. It was be able to resolve conflict. Don't have unnecess unnecessary problems with people. Don't make problems with people. Because when things happen and they go wrong, no person is an island. We're going to need the support of each other. And we can't do that if we're not speaking. And we can't do that if we don't trust each other. The next thing that they taught me, those folks, those wonderful people on that front porch, was to remember the dead. As I record this episode, we're a couple of weeks away from Memorial Day. And I will do a Memorial Day special. Memorial Day is very, very important to me for a variety of reasons that we'll talk about during that episode. But I remember sitting on the porch and each of them talking about the people that they lost in the service. In their generation, they lost an awful lot of people in World War II. My uncle Jake. Jake was in one of the units that tore across Europe. And he was he was on par with my great uncle Andy, who was with the big red one and was involved in just about every major battle there was. Andy was an infantryman. Jake was a military policeman. They did not ever talk about the horrors of what they saw with me until I was getting ready to start my own career. But Frank and Joe, they were both in the Navy. And it was no picnic being on a ship during World War II. In the Pacific, you had the Japanese kamikaze. In the Atlantic, you had the Nazi Wolfpacks and their submarines. It was a stress sandwich from the time the war started until the time the war ended. And they can remember every single one of their comrades that they went to school with, or this one grew up three doors down from us, and he never came home, and he's buried over in France because he was killed in Normandy. My grandmother spoke very, very fondly, and she would get worked up every single time. She said, you know, we went down to see all the boys off, and they opened the windows of the train and said, Don't worry, we're we're gonna get one of those Nazis. We're gonna get one for each of you. And they were some of the first ones killed. But they never forgot they're dead. And on Memorial Day, it was tradition to go to the cemeteries around that city and to clean up the stones, make sure there was no grass around them, make sure no bird droppings were on them, spruce them up, put some nice flowers and a little stick of cinnamon or something like that. But they said you never forget the dead, you know. Especially the ones who went to serve and died in the service of their country. They talked about those that had passed often and always fondly. And that left quite an impression on a young boy. And then the last thing that I remembered, because those of you that have listened for a few weeks know I kind of like a list of five, top five. One of the most important things that I I had as a takeaway is to take time to enjoy sitting on the porch. And if you're in a spot where you don't have a porch or a deck, when the weather is nice, try to find a spot outside that you can sit and listen to the crickets and watch the fireflies if you're in an area that has fireflies. Take the time to enjoy sitting and relaxing. Not that we had laptops or smartphones or anything like that back then, but they just sat around getting to know one another, listening to one another's troubles, offering advice when they could offer it, helping each other however they could help each other. There was no backbiting, there was no name calling. They just enjoyed sitting on the porch. And I think sometimes life now gets so busy that we just don't take time to sit on the porch, literally or figuratively, and relax and really enjoy what's going on around us and enjoy the people that are put here with us. So just some things to reflect on. I hope what I learned can translate translate into something that you all can learn. And I hope it makes you smile like reminiscing about it makes me smile. Well, we're at the point in the program where I'm gonna share some products that work out pretty well for me that I enjoy using that have never failed me. The first is Timberland Low-cut safety shoes. Since I retired from the service, I've had multiple jobs trying to figure out what I want to do when I grow up. And before I decided I wanted to be a podcaster, one of the things that I did was start a handyman business. And these low-cut safety shoes, uh they're the bee's knees, man. They've got a nice thick sole on them. I usually wear them when I'm working on any type of small electrical work. Um, but the safety shoes have have saved my toes on more occasions than I can recall to you dropping something on them or walking around the corner and kicking something as the day gets going and you're tired and you get a little clumsy. Uh the Timberland low-cut safety shoes can't say enough good things about them. The second um is the champion sweatshirts. I absolutely love sweatshirts made by the champion company. The cut fits me just right. They're extremely durable. You can't see me, but I have one on right now. Um, I've had this one for about 10 years. It is the it still looks pretty pretty good on me. It's retained its color. It hasn't faded despite hundreds of washings. It's nice and warm, but not overbearing. Can't say enough good things about the champion sweatshirts either. If there's a champion outlet in a like a Tangiers outlet center near you, the ones that you buy in the outlet are a little misshapen. Like one sleeve may be a little bit longer than the other, or there may be a pulled thread. It's not quite perfect. But you know what? It's very relatively inexpensive and it fits like a glove. I highly, highly recommend it. And then the last thing I want to talk about is the Uniball Vision pen. I have become quite the pen snob. I have cups and cups and containers full of pens, but I have never had a pen that writes so smooth as this Uniball Vision pen. It's like a liquid gel, and boy, it's fantastic. No smudging or smearing. I highly recommend it. The Uniball Vision Pen. All right. We're getting into the home stretch here. And so the one thing that I wanted to discuss before it got too late is preparation for summer. Um, summers have always been an integral part of my journey, and so many wonderful memories. I always look forward to to spring giving way to summer when it gets nice and warm and you can go out and enjoy yourself and really enjoy the breezes and the sunshine. Get your vitamin D. So, the first thing that I want to recommend to all of you is to get outside when you can. We all like to sit and scroll on our phones, and to and to me, that's a great rainy day activity while you're binge watching your favorite television show. But when that weather is nice, if you're able to do it, get outside when you can. Get the air, get the breeze, get your vitamin D. You'll be glad you did. Be smart about it. Put on the appropriate sunscreen. Too much of a good thing can be not a good thing. But get outside when you can. The next thing that I would say in preparation for summer is to work on being more physically fit. You don't have to spend a fortune in a gym or spend a fortune on home exercise equipment to get yourself physically fit. If you're able to walk, take a walk. Start out going up and down the block, then go to around the block, then go around the block a couple of times, work yourself up to around the neighborhood. If that's not possible, do what you can. If you need to get that aerobic exercise and walking or jogging isn't a possibility for you, I strongly recommend finding a place with a swimming pool and getting in that pool and do some shallow end water aerobics. Get the heart moving. The best place to get some exercise is in the water. Do some swimming. But please, please get out there, get moving around, and you know, get that blood flowing. And along those lines, the last thing that I would recommend is to take up a new hobby. I mentioned gardening earlier. I find it very, very relaxing. You don't have to till a field by hand and separate the rocks. You can do windowsill gardening or or big flower pot gardening. It can be as much or as little as you want it to be. But get outside, try something new that you haven't done before to really get the most out of every day this summer. Pickleball has become the rage. Um, I've tried it. It's good exercise. I find it a little bit more stressful than I like. Some of the folks that play it are are pretty hardcore. I think if I had a choice, I'm gonna try to take some tennis lessons because, well, I'm pretty horrible. I I don't look like a tennis player as much as I do a windmill, but um, it is it is a great sport, gets that aerobic activity. You feel pretty good, like you've had a good workout when it's done. Just make sure you have the proper shoes playing it so that you don't hurt your feet. And as I mentioned earlier, the water aerobics. Um I'm a certified water aerobics instructor. I could do an entire show on water aerobics and the benefits that I've seen it give people. Um where I swim, there is a woman who is 101 years old who does water aerobics, and she says she's been doing it for the last 40 years. So if it's good enough for Millie, it's good enough for me. God bless you, Millie. So those are just uh some of the things that I had on my mind I'd wanted to get out and share with all of you. As I say all the time, I am incredibly grateful for your time and attention. I think the greatest gift we can give one another is our time. And I'm awfully grateful that you're spending this time with me. We are now in the 21st century, and the podcast has an email address. So if you have any comments or there's some things you'd like to hear me talk about or a topic you'd like to for me to do some research on and discuss with you, email Amazing Journey Podcast at PM. That's the Amazing Journey Podcast at PM. One last time, A-M-A-Z-I-N-G-O-U-R-N-E-Y P-O-D-C-A-S-T at P-M dot M E. I will get back to you as soon as I'm able. And I look forward to being able to communicate with my listeners. I think that dialogue is very important. One small request, whatever you send me, uh please be respectful. My promise to you is that my response will be equally respectful. This is a place where we want to get off the podcast each week feeling good. Um, we can disagree on things. If I am factually incorrect, let me know and I will certainly correct myself. Uh, I take great pride in the fact that the information that I put out is factually correct. But uh please, I enjoy the communication. I look forward from to hearing from all of you. Until our next episode, I ask that you stay safe, that you be well, that you look after the people that you love, be kind, it doesn't cost anything. And I look forward to speaking to you again soon. This is Mike, and I'm signing off.