Take a knee why?
To the Editor,
There is so much misery in this old world we live in. We watch a game on TV and try not to think about it for awhile. Oops, some of the players are taking a knee protesting something some of these players probably don’t even know why.
Politics and protest should not become involved with sports. These players are lucky they live in this country. When eighth-graders take a knee, you can thank Kaepernick and TV. They are taking a knee in church probably because they have to put a few extra pesos in the basket.
Now I don’t claim to be the sharpest knife in the drawer, I may be Whistling Dixie here. Francis Scott Key wrote the National Anthem when we were at war on the Eastern Shores with the British in 1776. But hasn’t the flag and anthem come to represent every war we were ever in and the men and women who gave their lives so we could have our freedom? I should have mentioned this up above. My excuse is I’m 89.
Go to North Korea, China or Russia. Take a knee on what ever game they are playing. You will be down on two knees praying they don’t shoot you.
Mr. Trump tells it like it is and does not pull any punches. That’s why he is disliked by so many people, but you have to give him credit for taking out Assad’s chemicals, when Obama did not. Now he’s got ding-dong Kim shaking in his boots. If he fires a nuclear tipped weapon, he will be adios, amigo. How many presidents would do that? When Hillary and Trump go at it again, he gets my three votes.
I hope I have given all the readers out there in R-P land a few laughs, because in this crazy mixed-up world we live in, we need all the laughs we can get.
Anthony Ivelich
Freedom
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Window shopping lost in a cloud
To the Editor,
Earlier this year when I used to walk downtown to catch the bus to go to work, I made it a habit to check out the vinyl records on display at the East Lake Avenue window of the Watsonville Goodwill store on Main Street. Once, my forward progress stopped cold by one of the albums. It was “Frampton Comes Alive,” and I said to myself, “That was almost the first album I ever bought.”
The next time walking past Goodwill and looking through the window, “Frampton Comes Alive” was gone. Another time walking by, the James Taylor album, “Sweet Baby James” was on display. The cover shot of Taylor was one of the most often seen images in the 1970s. And the next time I walked by it was gone. It goes without saying that “Frampton Comes Alive” and “Sweet Baby James” were seen from the street and bought outright by someone who was moved by those records.
Recently watching the opening sequence of the motion picture “Saturday Night Fever,” the first shot before we even see John Travolta’s face is him comparing his shoe to the brand new shoe in a window display. Moments later Travolta sees a light blue shirt in another window display. He goes inside and asks the proprietor if the store does layaways and says, “put me down for $5 for that blue shirt in the window.”
These recent instances got me thinking to the somewhat antiquated action of window shopping. In this day and age of Costcos, Targets, Walmarts, big box stores, and with fewer small, intimate shops, window shopping may soon be a thing of the past. These days people do their window shopping on the internet.
Yet, there is something special about in-person window shopping. Being there live checking out a shirt in the window two hours before the shop opens and thinking “maybe I’ll come back and put a down payment on it or just buy it.” Patrick James in Aptos is one of the few remaining shops where you can still see a cool shirt in the window for sale.
As for Goodwill in Watsonville, most of their former window now looks like a cloud. You cannot see old vinyl records from the street now. I wish they would melt the cloud and let us again see inside.
Charles Birimisa
Watsonville
