This might be rough for some. Not everyone had a happy childhood. Mine certainly had its rough spots, but for the most part, we had a lot of opportunities for pure joy too. So, in no particular order, here is a hit parade from the 70s.

Music - My mom and stepfather had a record player that stayed busy. I grew up listening to music that I still play today. We had all the Beatles albums. James Taylor got a lot of airtime. Especially for us kids, we got to listen to Pete Seeger sing Little Boxes and Abi-Yoyo. I even remember my stepfather playing a particular Arlo Guthrie record with Alice's Restaurant. My own dad was partial to Neil Diamond, so I get feelings for him whenever I hear one of the familiar songs.

Food - My mom didn't always cook breakfast, but more often than not, we didn't have to resort to cereal. Being in the South meant that bacon, eggs, and grits were a staple, although she had an actual waffle iron, so we got that sometimes. Pancakes and oatmeal were also on offer. When we did get cereal, there was always a controversy over whose turn it was to get the prize in the bottom of the box. I wasn't really fond of the "eat everything on your plate" rule that my stepfather imposed because Mom insisted on regularly serving English peas, which I despise to this day. I did learn how to enjoy asparagus though.

Travel - We weren't that well off, but we managed to have plenty of opportunities to visit parks and beaches when we happened to be living in the eastern part of the state. We moved a lot. When I grew up, I took my kids to some of the same places I'd been able to go to as a kid. One problem with travel was the size of the cars my parents had. Imagine five people in a Ford Pinto on a late-night trip up Interstate 95 from central NC to Washington, DC. That one was partially a business trip. My stepfather, a journalist, got to attend a press conference with other NC reporters to grill President Ford.

Holidays - Despite the lack of funds, we were never disappointed at Christmas. We got all the regular stuff kids get: bikes that lasted for years, baseball gloves, and always books about whatever we happened to be interested in at the time. We usually traveled to see family too. To my mother's everlasting credit, even though she and my dad got divorced around the time I started school, she has stayed in contact with his family to this very day. My dad lived out of state, but we still got to see our grandparents, our aunt, and our uncles.

Freedom - In the time before cell phones and excessive protectiveness, we had the license to roam. I was a hustler as a kid, always on the lookout to make a few bucks, and I rode my bike far and wide looking for soda bottles to sell back to the store. I walked the roads looking for aluminum cans. My mom willingly took me to the salvage yard to cash those in. We always had permission to go to the library when we lived someplace where it was close enough to get to. Some summers I practically lived there. Lots of times we lived in apartments with pools, and when we didn’t, we joined a co-op pool, which I didn't realize until I was an adult was whites only. I was born the year the civil rights act was signed, but there were still vestiges of segregation around if you looked.

TV and Movies - We had the same 19-inch TV my entire childhood. In the afternoons, we'd watch black and white re-runs of The Beverly Hillbillies, The Andy Griffith Show, and Gomer Pyle. Some of our favorite nighttime shows were Happy Days and * Laverne and Shirley.* One little town we lived in had a main street movie theater with one-dollar tickets. We could just about see the place from our house, and we got to go there whenever anything appropriate was playing. We still make fun of my sister for leaving Pippi Longstocking early because she got scared.

What was best about all of that was that it took place in an environment of my mother's love and commitment to give us the best childhood she could. She 100% succeeded, and I am so very grateful to this day.

Enjoyed it? Please upvote 👇

For a good part of my life, I tried to be religious and failed miserably. During my formative years, church was a social connection as well as a place for religious instruction. During elementary school, my Mom was married to a non-believer, so she didn't attend church, but my siblings and I went with a neighbor to a Southern Baptist church on the outskirts near the prison. My brother and I were active in the boys’ youth group, called RAs for Royal Adventurers. In the summer, we went to VBS (Vacation Bible School).

In high school, I lived with my aunt and uncle. They went to a Presbyterian Church, one of many in the area, reflecting the Scottish heritage in the part of North Carolina where we lived. One of my favorite parts of each week was the Sunday evening Youth Fellowship meetings. It was the one place where kids from the different high schools in the area hung out together. We had a church league softball team that was a lot of fun. Our yearly beach trip was something I looked forward to immensely. I got a lot of love there in spite of getting caught smoking weed by the youth minister. I wasn't a well-behaved kid, but I was still welcome.

As an adult, I have attended Baptist, Presbyterian, and Seventh-day Adventist churches. I've been baptized at least twice. I may have also been baptized as a baby since during the brief time my parents were married to each other, they attended the Methodist church, which practices infant baptism. All three of my children attended private, church-affiliated schools for part of their K-12 lives.

Both my sister and my father are ordained ministers in the United Methodist Church. It was a second career for both of them. In retirement, Dad no longer worships at a Methodist church because it has grown too liberal for him. My mother has done medical missionary work in Rwanda. She is a member of an Anglican church that is affiliated with the Rwandan version of that denomination. She was a member of an Episcopalian church for a long time, but when her congregation split after the ordination of Gene Robinson, an openly gay bishop, she went with her husband and the other conservatives to form a new congregation. My sister has many of the same political beliefs that I hold, and she is one of the few people I feel comfortable talking to when it comes to issues of faith.

Despite all that churching, I ended up a non-believer. I tried as hard as I knew how to find a connection with a supernatural God, but I never felt anything, not ever. As a recovering alcoholic from the 12-Step tradition, which relies heavily on the concept of a "higher power," I had to do considerable mental gymnastics to finally get sober. I finally resolved to use my AA group as a power greater than myself. Collectively, that is 100% true, and it was only after I stopped fighting against what I felt was an inappropriate religious influence that I was able to stop drinking for good, or at least for the last 16 years.

Aside from the lack of an emotional connection with religion, my other reasons for the position I hold are much the same as many other non-believers. I can't reconcile things like the Holocaust and childhood leukemia with a loving and caring God. The historical reality of how the Bible became canon is more than a little sus to me as well. I really like quite a few parts of it anyway, especially The Sermon on the Mount, which is as good an outlook on a righteous life as I have seen anywhere. I am also disgusted to the very core of who I am as a person with right-wing-influenced Christianity. People who talk Jesus out of one side of their mouth and cut nutrition programs for the poor out of the other side are contemptible, and I want as little to do with them as possible. When I think of the average white conservative Christian, I think of the ways they advocate for things like discrimination against LGBT people, their support for the death penalty, and their attempts to force their beliefs into the political fabric of a country that was founded on religious freedom. I like Christians like Jimmy Carter and Martin Luther King, Jr. I do not like Christians like James Dobson and Tony Perkins. I think they are evil people.

Enjoyed it? Please upvote 👇

Brandon asked - "Do you have faith in the future of humanity? Why or why not?"

By nature, I am neither a pessimist nor an optimist. I do the best I can to live in the moment. The future will take care of itself, I figure. I do have my moments where I dare to contemplate what's going to happen. I don't always have a rosy view. Like a lot of people, the recent presidential election shook me to my core. The realization of a lot of my worst fears is already in motion as our new government takes shape. From a purely personal perspective, here in old white guy land, things are just grand. The future of Lou is pretty rosy, but I will be damned before I let that selfish perspective be the lens through which I view the world.

As bad as things look, there is one overriding truth. Throughout the history of mankind, things have always gotten better. Sometimes the pace has been excruciatingly slow. At other times, progress has been made at breathtaking speed. I look at things like HIV research. We've gone from an epidemic illness being a death sentence to it becoming just another treatable illness in one generation. We went from the first airplane to landing on the moon in a single lifetime. Mankind is badass like that.

When I talk to friends having a rough time, I like to remind them that every bad thing that has ever happened to them in the whole entire life hasn't killed them. Whatever they happen to be going through at the moment, whether it be a lost job, a divorce, or something else, isn't likely to kill them either. Sometimes in life, you lose battle after battle only to win the war. During the civil rights movement, the people of Birmingham had police dogs turned on them and were sprayed with fire hoses as police chief Bull Connor dealt violently with nonviolent protesters. John Lewis had his skull fractured for marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. The very next year, the Civil Rights Act was passed. Bull Connor lost, and John Lewis won.

Life is a series of peaks and valleys. When we are down in the valley like we are right now, it's hard to remember what the mountain tops were like. It's a lot easier to be pessimistic than it is to be positive. People of faith have heaven to look forward to, but secular people just have their one wild and precious life. I'll not let anyone take away the things in this life that give it meaning. I will continue to be a loud and proud progressive. I will hold on to the values I have until I find a better alternative. There are plenty of people like me. The conservatives have won two majorities over a period of 32 years. Their current hold on power is temporary, and unless we move into a total dictatorship, and I realize there is a chance of that, we will have weapons of democracy to use.

The challenges we face are real. Climate change, competition for resources, rising authoritarianism, oppression of vulnerable minorities - all of these things are real. We will experience setbacks in combating them, but we will win in the end. We always do.

Enjoyed it? Please upvote 👇

Inspired by a post from Annie Mueller, I thought I'd write about humor today.

Making wisecracks is one of my primary forms of communication. Just about anything can be funny if you frame it the right way. It sometimes shocks people who don't know me that well, but anyone who has to suffer through working with me gets used to it rather quickly. I lean towards dry and acerbic humor because that's pretty much the way I perceive the world. There are an awful lot of absurd things about being alive, and pointing them out to people gives me purpose. I can't stand it when there is an obvious joke waiting to be made and yet no one will say anything because "inappropriate." No! Someone needs to get that laugh. It might as well be me.

I went through a stage when I downloaded routines of some of the most famous comics who have ever lived to listen to when I was spending a lot of time in my car for work. Being funny on demand didn't seem easy, but it didn't seem that hard either. I thought about writing some jokes and going to an open mic night at a comedy club, but I never followed through. For one thing, me and bars don't mix well, and I also might have been a little bit chicken. It was still fun listening to Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce, Bill Hicks and even Bill Cosby. This was before he went to prison for being a predator.

I think Richard Pryor is probably the funniest human who ever lived. His humor is timeless because it's about the human condition. A lot of comedians do topical comedy, which is funny at the moment, but it doesn't age well. My daughter thought me and her mother were so weird because we went on and on about how funny the show In Living Color was. She finally found it on DVD and watched a few episodes. It was full of jokes about Barbara Bush and Mike Tyson and other people who just weren't part of her world. She was very disappointed and hasn't asked me for entertainment options in a very long time.

I try not to be think-skinned when listening to stand-up. I'm more than willing to grant artistic license to a performer, but there are still some lines that don't need to be crossed. I don't like anti-trans humor. If you were to substitute some other marginalized group for tans folks into some of those jokes, people would look at you like you were wearing a Klan robe. I get that not everyone "gets" the struggle of that community, but making jokes at their expense is getting old. Even otherwise perceptive people like Dave Chappelle and Ricky Gervais fall into the not-funny category when it comes to that brand of humor.

I love using humor as a weapon when I don't have anything else to offer. Any time someone tries to defend the indefensible to me, I laugh at them. You want to defend Trump? You're funny because he's a clown, and you're one too if you're defending him. Not only that, but you want to tell me why the death penalty or cutting school lunch programs are good ideas? I'm going to laugh right in your face. How can you seriously feel that way and call yourself a human being? Maybe that's disrespectful. Ok, it is disrespectful, but I don't really care. Laughing at you is better than fighting with you, which I don't care to do.

Feel free to send me jokes.

Enjoyed it? Please upvote 👇

AMA - What's one of the hardest things you have ever done?

My Dad woke up this morning and didn't know what day it was. Panicked, he sent a text message to almost everyone in the family asking for help. At this point, that means my siblings and his. We are a close family and several of us sprang into action. His brother-in-law lives a couple of miles away and was the first to arrive. My aunt, a nurse with more than 40 years experience was there within the hour. They got him to the doctor and then the hospital where the doctors are running tests to rule out a stroke. His thinking seems to have cleared up since he sent the original text but he still couldn't figure out how to set an alarm on his phone. That kind of thing is starting to happen with more frequency.

Dad is the sole care-giver for my step-mother who has Alzheimers. She still know who he is, although most of the rest of us are becoming strangers to her. She still hugs me and tells me she loves me, but when she was recently asked by a doctor how many children my Dad has (four), she was unable to answer. Her and Dad were in a car accident last month and the next day she didn't understand why she felt so sore, unable to remember what happened. Even though he walks with a cane or a walker, Dad still cooks for her and takes her on the daily drive she insists on going on.

My Dad was the first person I knew to have a computer. It was one he purchased at Radio Shack in the 80s. His experience with them predates Windows. Like lots of old-timers, he likes to talk about how much he paid for a 10MB hard drive back in the day. He used spreadsheets in DOS and used to be a master at writing batch files. Recently, he asked me to come help him with some IT issues. He has having problems changing the ink in his printer and wanted to make sure some important documents were getting back up. He's also mentioned not being able to remember how to access his photos or music. I was glad to help but I could see that he is starting to get frustrated by having to remember the procedures for tasks he's done for so many years.

My Dad and I don't see eye to eye on many things, especially politics. I've never liked to verbally spar with him because emotions take over and I can't think straight. He has always been one of the most intellectually capable people that I know. A lifelong voracious reader, he's a walking encyclopedia about a great many things. Unfortunately, some of the facts he's assimilated in the last 15 years came from Fox News, an outlet not known for presenting both sides of an issue. We do best when we talk about computers or when he tells stories about my grandparents. There are a great many things he doesn't like because they differ from what he considers traditional. You've heard about the type of person who wishes life today was like the 1950s? That's him.

Although he is financially able to afford assisted living for himself and my step-mother, he has so far resisted doing much more than just looking into it. He says that he is willing to pay for in home care, but so far he hasn't made any moves to get that underway. Maybe today's events will spur him into action.

Every time I see him these days, I have to determine whether he's having a good day or bad day. He has a sensitive nature, so I have to be circumspect. I have done my best in adulthood to let go of resentments toward him with varying levels of success. It has not been easy and that's on me. I feel like he does the best he can. I might wish he were different, but he isn't. He is who he is, and my job is to accept that the best I can.

As you may be able to tell, I am not a big fan of the aging process for me or anyone else, not that I have anything but wishful thinking to combat the process. I don't like the effects it has on me and I don't like seeing the way it changes the people I love. Writing this is the outlet for feeling that way. Thanks for reading.

Enjoyed it? Please upvote 👇

Life is full of little moments we love to recount later. Here's a small collection of some of my favorites.

Encouraged To Leave

I have been “encouraged to leave” both a library and a used book store — and I was totally innocent both times. I impishly asked a reference librarian if she knew another word for “thesaurus”. Next thing I know there’s a deputy sheriff at my elbow. I thought I was off the hook because I used to work with him, but no. Out the door I went. At the used book store, I was looking at a book on wine. This is before I quit drinking, although I was sober for the purpose of this story. I think. Anyway, I’m looking through the book and I start finding big, gorgeous marijuana leaves, dried and pressed between the pages. There were a dozen or more. Laughing, I approached the front desk to show them. They didn’t think it was as funny as I did, and...you guessed it. Out the door I went. I still like to read though. I’ve never been kicked off Amazon.

Everything You Need to Get on the Internet

Back in the days when people were just starting to get online, Walmart ran a special on 14.4 modems, complete with an AOL disk and a phone cord. On the box it said "Everything You Need to Get on the Internet". Someone bought one and called me (I did side jobs back then) to help them get it set up. When I showed up, they handed me the box and looked at me expectantly. I asked them where their computer was and they looked confused. They pointed at the box - "Everything you need to get on the Internet." They didn't own a computer.

Two Boxes of Junior Mints

I have three kids, two girls and a boy. For the most part, they got along well when they were living at home. Group dynamics being what they are, there were times when they would go to war along gender lines with the girls using their two to one advantage. My son is a gentle soul who's never done a mean thing in his life, but he would get so exasperated at his sisters that he'd contemplate extreme measures at times. Once they'd done something that drove him to a dark place and he issued one of the most famous threats in family history. Shaking with anger, he told his step-mom and I, "If the girls don't leave me alone, I'm going to buy two boxes of Junior Mints and I'm not giving them any!" That was it. That was the meanest thing he could think of.

Getting Used to Farm Life

Prior to the age of 14, I'd been a city kid all my life. Then I loved to my uncle's farm, where I lived throughout high school. When I first moved there, he also managed a commercial hog farm, and I rode with him daily to work. As we moved around from barn to barn, I did my best to avoid stepping in anything unpleasant. Since there were thousands of hogs around, this was a difficult task, and it slowed me down considerably, much to his consternation. Finally, he couldn't take it anymore. He grabbed me by the arm, bent over and scooped something off the ground and rubbed it on my hand. He said, "Now you've hot hog shit on you. Quit dancing around and keep up. Let's go to work." A few years later, I was out in the cow pasture at home with a wheelbarrow picking up dried cow chips by hand to use as garden fertilizer. He saw me and brought up the earlier incident, remarking on how far I'd come in my farming career.

Enjoyed it? Please upvote 👇