My dad passed away on January 16th, 2022. He had been deteriorating since the past spring and ended peacefully on the night of the 22nd. I learned more about my dad through his blog, and perhaps that was his intent. He honed his writing skills to share his observations on a variety of topics that I believe many enjoyed, including myself. He was a far better writer than me, so I share his older blog that we used for his obituary shown above.
Andy Walck
My father had it; my mother did not. I inherited it and passed it on to one of my sons. The other son thinks we’re both crazy. It is a condition of restlessness; the feeling we have to move an arm or a leg. It affects 20% of older people and is related to the restless leg syndrome. There is no cure without difficult side-effects.
You might think it as a blessing giving you extra time to do the little chores of life, but it is not. The restlessness that keeps you up at night makes it impossible to read, watch TV, or write letters. I envy my wife as she sleeps like a baby. One rule we had in our younger days is that we need 8 hours of sleep every night: 16 hours of activity followed by 8 hours of sleep. It was our classmate Jerry Jerome who pointed out that was true only for when we were young: as we age, we need less and less sleep, so that at our age, now, we only need 4-5 hours of sleep; in fact, we can only tolerate 4-5 hours of sleep at a time. Perhaps counting all of the naps, we still get 8 hours, just not all at once. If we anticipate a big day coming up, we can go to bed early, but we just toss and turn for the extra hours.
The heebie-jeebies was just my father’s name for it. At other times, he called it the jim-jams. Same thing. The technical term is the Restless Leg Syndrome.
Rwalck@Verizon.net.
I don’t know which is more surprising: that I sang at all (I cannot carry a recognizable tune) or that I sang a hymn (I am not religious).
It must have been something my wife said because I started singing,
Till we mee . . . ee . . . eet,
Till we mee . . . eet.
God be with you till we meet again.
“Oh,” my wife said. “That’s what they sing at funerals.”
Looking up the lyrics on the Internet, I think she’s right. (Keep in mind, this is a woman who as a teenager went to a Billy Graham revival, worked her way down to the stage and was accepted or anointed, or whatever he does, by Billy, himself. So she knows more about these things than I do.)
There are many versions of the song. You may be more familiar with another.
Rwalck@Verizon.net
We have good friends about our age, okay, maybe a little younger but definitely our generation, with a ten-year-old granddaughter, and they recently bought her an AM-FM radio at a second-hand store for $25.
She love it and carries it with her!
She generally listens to the AM for news and talk and FM for music. She extends and adjusts the antenna for the best reception, and doesn’t require a cable connection. All free for as much as she wants!
Ah, yes, I remember the feeling.
RWalck@Verizon.net
When we were on our China tour several years ago, we met a Chinese husband and wife from California, somewhat younger than ourselves. They spoke perfect, unaccented English, and I never thought of them as anything but fellow Americans.
Towards the end of our tour, I was standing next to the woman, looking over the side of our ship, watching an almost naked old farmer near the bank plowing his field with a water buffalo. I was very surprised when she turned to me and said thoughtfully, “You know, that could be my grandfather.”
Oh, right, I reminded myself, once Chinese, always Chinese to we native Americans, and you are at least of Chinese descent.
Rwalck@Verizon.net
Howard Johnson’s
Sambo’s
Kenny Rogers’ Roasters
Minnie Pearl’s Chicken
White Tower (Castle)
Chi-Chi’s
Steak & Ale
Gino’s Hamburgers
Mr. Steak
Bob’s Big Boy
Bennigan’s
Red Barn
Hot Shoppes (now Mariott Marquis)
Rwalck@Verizon.net
We arrived early in the morning at the Great Wall. but the crowds with many vendors were already there.
Where the steps rose, the railing along the wall was set too low, and everyone struggled, both native Chinese and Americans.
But our guide explained it away by saying, “These steps were built for Chinese soldiers, not American tourists.” He said it good-naturedly, and we all laughed.
No, the steps were fine. It was the railings, as we knew.
RWalck@Veizon.net
Kip Keino, the world-famous distant runner, the first runner from Africa who started a whole genre of rail-thin African distant runners, was back in the news.
This was before the last Olympics, and the real news was about his son who was attending Stanford and was training for the next Olympics.
The interviewer and the Keinos, father and son, had it all worked out. She was at one end of a track, and in the distance, at the far end of the track, came the Keinos. They arrived just as the interviewer ended her introduction.
As they approached, it was easy to tell them apart. Kip was plodding along, as anyone his age would, determinedly putting one foot in front of the other. His son, however, in his 20s, was bounding along as if on springs.
The unintended moral of the story is that aging gets us all—even celebrated Olympic champions.
Rwalck@Verizon.net
Years ago, we rented in Florida for the whole month of April. There, we met a former Freeholder from New Jersey.
He told us the story of when he was chairing a public meeting on constructing a third water tower in the community. Almost every speaker was opposed. They recognized the need, but felt, “Not in my backyard.”
Finally, our Freeholder friend asked the audience where the other two water towers were. No one could tell him, even though they were in plain sight. He pointed out that when we see something every day, we learn to ignore it and don’t see it at all. The same would eventually happen to the new water tower.
Rwalck@Verizon.net
When I began investing many years ago, I listened to Bernard Meltzer on WCAU radio. He was a soft-spoken, Jewish father figure who gave advice on any question that came his way, be it on investing, someone’s love life, or how to fix a toilet.
If you came into a sum of money he recommend putting it into your house by paying off the mortgage. This was a time when typical investing advice was to take the longest mortgage possible and invest the money in the stock market. The stock gains would easily pay the mortgage.
Meltzer explained his was not good investing advice, but human advice. We should have the security of owning our home free and clear so we could always have a place that was ours, even if we had millions in stocks. The peace of mind would be worth far more than money.
I followed his advice by only accepting 15-year mortgages and paying cash for everything else, even cars. Now, I am glad I did. For most of my life, I have had no mortgage or car payments. There is no money I have to come up with each month. This is not bragging, just practicing what I believe. I have always felt the value of money was in the security it provided, not in the luxuries it could buy.
Rwalck@Verizon.net
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Lansdowne-Aldan High School -- Class of 1954 