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When I was a young, I loved to write. As you can tell, I still do. One of my aspirations as a child was to become a writer. Most of the writings that I did as a child were done based on assignments that were given in school. The ones that I made in school that were good enough that my teachers chose to keep them. Those were not the days of computers where, I could just print an extra copy for my teachers. Whether or not my teachers had copying facilities, making a copy never occurred to them, because with them keeping my originals, I never saw them again.

Though I never got those papers back, I can clearly remember some of my best writing.
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I spent over 49 years of my life in a formal school setting. Most of those years were spent as a teacher. All of those years were spent as a learner, whether I was sitting in the pupil’s chair or the teacher’s. I learned a lot over all those years. One of my most memorable moments in all my schooling years happened when I was in 5th grade as a student. It involved trust, respect and willingness of my 5th grade teacher to believe in our class.
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I had a plan. Having had a successful experience with a dentist, I now knew what pain free dentistry was like. For my next venture to Dr. Guenther I would attempt to teach him about modern dentistry. The plan was simple. I would first tell him about the numbing paste. I assumed that even if I didn’t know its chemical name, he would, once I described it. My next instruction would be on the use of Novocain, of which I was sure he was familiar. On the off chance that he did not have any of those materials at hand, I explained my system of raising my arm to signal him, should any pain be involved in his work. I was confident that I would prevail against the Dentist of Pain. Boy was I wrong!
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I’ve been with the same dentist for over 30 years. He is now in partnership with his son, so I can anticipate continuing with this practice for many more years. Both dentists are very personable, have a good understanding of my needs and my family’s needs. They are excellent at what they do. I originally went to this practice based on a recommendation by one of my teaching colleagues. This was the first time I ever had to pay for my own dental work; I wanted to make sure that I picked the right practice. This wasn’t the case growing up, where I had no choice. My parents, both immigrants from Germany, were the people that chose who was going to deal with my teeth as I grew up. Unfortunately for me finding the best dentist wasn’t necessarily their highest priority.
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It may be hard to believe, but when I was young, my mother used to lock our refrigerator. It was an old fashioned refrigerator, with one door and handle to open it. Inside there was a freezer part on the top about the size of a bread box, with its own pull down door and the rest was just refrigerator space for regular stuff. Having only one door on the outside it was easy for my mother to take a length of chain, wrap it around the refrigerator and have a keyed lock in place to prevent any unauthorized entrance. You might wonder why?
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When I was young my mother used to always take me food shopping. My parents didn’t drive, so we always walked. One place we always shopped was the butcher shop. It was about two and a half blocks from our house, crossing local streets. It’s where we purchased most of our meats, dairy and fruits. The owner of the butcher shop was Jack. He was very friendly. I used to wrangle a free banana off of him by doing impersonations. A popular singer at that time was Eddie Fisher. One of the impersonations that I did was of Eddie Fisher singing the song, “Oh My Papa”. Jack would ask me to stand on one of his milk cartons and sing that song. At that young age, I wasn’t very inhibited. As a reward I got the banana. I always enjoyed going to the butcher with my mom.
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