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Thursday, April 4, 2013
The Rhinoceros Times Greensboro
Puppy Brings Back Memories of Dad by john hammer editor
I was thinking about my father when I was carrying my puppy across the street last week. I thought about my father because I don’t think there was ever a time when I crossed the street with him when he didn’t at least try to take hold of my hand. When I was little I found it as comforting as getting down under the covers on a cold night. I didn’t think anything bad could possibly happen to me while I was holding my father’s hand. When I got a little older it was just accepted, although I enjoyed it more than I would admit. As a teenager I, of course, would go to great lengths not to be next to my father when crossing the street because I was mortified at the idea of holding his hand. Sometimes he would grab my elbow, which in my mind was even worse, or my shoulder, which wasn’t so bad. Then, as happens with so many things in life, in my late 20s I got so I didn’t mind. In my 30s I was entertained by the fact that my father still insisted on holding my hand when crossing a street. In my late 30s I got so I liked it, and in my 40s I was pretty much back where we started. I thought it was such a privilege to hold my father’s hand when we crossed the street that I wouldn’t trade it for anything. As a child I knew that our family’s restrictions on crossing the street were more severe than other families, but it wasn’t until I was an older adult that I put two and two together and realized that there was good reason for that. When my father was still a small child growing up in Red Bank, New Jersey, he saw his brother, who was riding a bike across an intersection, get hit and killed by a car. Experiences like that you don’t forget, and 75 years later when you’re crossing the street you reach out and grab the hand of your little boy who happens to be 47 and thinks he’s helping you.
Rumors (Continued from page 1) increasing the cost of running a business downtown. But here is another good idea that would cost the city nearly nothing: The two-block-long parking lot, which is called Commerce Street, is rarely over half full. Make parking free in the northern half of the lot, which is almost always nearly empty. The lot would fill up in no time, helping business at no more cost to the city than the cost of taking up parking meters and printing signs that say “Free Parking.” The city will no doubt need help with those signs because the concept of free parking is new to the city. ---
Downtown Greensboro Inc., an organization that despite the name appears to know nothing about downtown business, supported making bars on windows and doors downtown illegal. Someone attempted to break into the World Headquarters of The Rhinoceros Times Monday night. Tuesday, as I searched our basement for signs of an intruder, I wished I had put bars on that window so I wouldn’t have to worry about some thief hiding in the basement. It’s hard to imagine a downtown organization so out of touch that it doesn’t understand the importance of bars on windows in a downtown. The police do a (Continued on page 6)
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