Mary and I were riding in a Washington D.C. hotel elevator over the weekend and shared a few words with a woman passenger.
I asked where she was from and she said Colorado. I mentioned Delaware and her immediate comment was: “You have someone famous from your state — Joe Biden.”
I agreed.
Then she added: “And Joe Flacco!”
I was a little surprised that she at once put the former University of Delaware quarterback, who is now doing the same job for the Baltimore Ravens, in approximately the same category of fame.
I did remember, though, that the Ravens had just beaten the Denver Broncos, tagging that team with its first loss of the NFL season. Perhaps that was why Joe Flacco came quickly to her mind when Delaware was mentioned.
Of course Flacco isn’t really from Delaware. His hometown is Audubon, N.J. But he certainly made a name for himself in Delaware and might well become one of the top professional quarterbacks of all time.
The lady had other Delaware connections. She has a brother in Newark and has spent vacation time in Bethany Beach.
*****
We had been in the Old Town area of Alexandria, Va., before but for some reason had not traveled down King Street toward the Potomac River. In the company of son Paul — he lives in next door Arlington and was driving — we did get to see the colorful waterfront this time.
We found Old Town to be a very interesting place. It has a variety of stores and shops and a slew of restaurants.
We stopped at the Union Street Public House on South Union Street and sat in a booth on the second floor in an eating place carved out of an old brick building.
It was busy. Next to us was a group of a dozen young women in their late 20s, by my reckoning, who had obviously met for a joint lunch and were constantly talking. Their keeping up a high volume of chatter and laughter made it easy for us to talk. With all their happy noise they couldn’t possibly have overheard what we were saying, not that we were involved in any scintillating conversation.
The single most interesting element of our Old Town visit was listening to an man expertly making music by rubbing the rims of about 50 different water glasses filled with water in different amounts. He could even play the Star Spangled Banner beautifully. People gathered about his playing space on a corner of King and Union Street and filled a little box with donations.
*****
We also had breakfast early Sunday morning with Paul and his 10-year-old son Alex, where the talk at one point turned to all the various school drills which have been carried out in the past half century or so. I’m referring to drills in the interest of safety.
Fire drills go back a long time, of course. Even in my elementary school days — in the log cabin era — we had them,
Our own children, though, can remember steps taken to be ready for possible enemy air raids.
This was in the early 1960s when tension was high between the United States and the Soviet Union over missiles that country had transported to Cuba.
More recently, Virginia public schools have seen drills for possible toxic gases. There also is a drill now held regularly for what to do if a dangerous person is reported in the school’s area. In that drill individual schoolrooms are locked and shades pulled down so a possible dangerous intruder could not see whether or not anyone was inside the room.
As Alex succinctly concluded: “School is a dangerous place.”
*****
Dennis Forney is the enterprising publisher of the Cape Gazette, a weekly newspaper that is must reading for anyone wanting to be informed about what is going on in the Lewes/Rehoboth Beach area. It carries more pages than any other weekly in the state.
Always busy, Dennis started the Delmarva Quarterly eight years ago, a magazine devoted to features celebrating the people and places of the Delmarva Peninsula. This meant serving readers in an area from Wilmington to Cape Charles, Va.
As one of the regular readers, I was always impressed by the high quality of the content.
At first it was sold on newsstands. Then, to give advertisers as much customer reach as possible for their money, Dennis upped the circulation numbers and had the publication distributed for free pick-up.
But after the fall issue, and while getting ready for the winter edition, Dennis found that he had to pull the plug. After early years of the quarterly making a profit, the downturn in business activity caught up with the magazine.
“But we gave it a shot,” Dennis said with satisfaction when I talked to him about it.
“I remember hearing that nothing beats a try but a failure,” he added. “We feel very good about what we did.”
And well they should. The magazine gave readers a lot of pleasure. It will be missed. There is nothing else on the peninsula as good. We all owe a debt of gratitude to Dennis and his staff, and to the contributing writers, for the top-level material the magazine always carried.
*****
(Note: If you have never had a dog, this joke might not work for you.)
A dog walks into a bar and says to the bartender, “My name is Bill and I’m a talking dog. Isn’t that wonderful? I’ll bet you’ve never heard a talking dog before. I’ll bet there’s no one as smart as me. How about a drink for a talking dog?”
And the bartender says, “Sure, the toilet is right down the hall!”
