I just returned from Mt. Royals Shopping Center…..(They call them supermarches in French) where I picked up the latest Reader. I try to pick one up every week one of my columns appears. I like reading them in the actual paper just as I like to go to the Reader webpage to do the same.
I woke up late this morning 8:30. It took me hours to fall asleep and at 2 I gave up and practiced my French for a couple hours. So as I write this short post its already almost 2 in the afternoon. I’ve got some reading and writing to do but I cranked out a column on pedophilia which I think I can turn into next week’s column. That gives me time to finish another chapter in the story of a part of America’s extermination of Indians before I start writing. So when I got to Mt. Royal there was the annual table where Boy Scouts sell popcorn and I had to buy a bag of Carmel corn just like I have to buy girl scout cookies when they come up for sale. I buy more freely from the girl scouts because I like their cookies better.
So as I approached a boy scout and his family I was asked if I had boy scouts in the family. My Dad, the least outdoors ready man I ever knew, was a Life Scout and I only managed to reach being a First Class Scout. (lower on the rank totem pole) I started in Kansas and rejoined them in North Mankato, Minnesota. I only mentioned my brief membership to the popcorn venders. I tried to get my son in Tiger Cubs a new innovation for very young kids but he wasn’t happy to have me at his meetings/; He never got into cub scouts. But I could add of my own time in the Scouts that our meetings were always on Monday night so that I missed Outer Limits a Twilight Zone like series. I told the corn sellers I was conflicted and the Dad commiserated with me telling me that it was the era before Netflix.
My experiences in Scouts were nothing much to write home about but it didn’t do me any harm. Certainly Scouts had not yet been exposed as a magnet for pedophiles. Which by the way is a good lead in to a long story about a current wave of exposing and shaming adults who are on the look out for available teens to have sex with. I read a very long story that sympathetically treated the exposers up to a point and one of the people they exposed who demanded a day in court. I am grateful for the New York Times for printing an intelligent story that treats both sides of this tricky issue with respect. (Darn. I can’t find it now)
As for Outer Limits. In the VHS days my Dad bought us one of the first players. This was before Blockbuster and the only place I could find the first VHS movies was a porno store in Downtown Duluth. The Porno was hidden by some curtains. I was delighted to find copies of the Outer Limits to play for my kids who were in grade school at the time. They liked them.
