Seems Like Old Times by Martin Hood

I spent the weekend at the Conyers Cherry Blossom Festival.  Wind aside, the event turned out beautifully.  I said hello to some friends I haven’t seen in awhile, got to talk a lot of our current customers again, and hopefully made some new ones (friends and customers.)  As I found myself talking to some of them I would inevitably ask them what kind of job we were doing for them and how their service had been.  I was pleased to say that I didn’t get one negative response!  In fact, it was refreshing to hear all the positive responses and feed back on my technicians.  I was surprised at how much I remembered about some of my old customers from back when I was “teching.”  I could recall their homes, where certain SENTRICON stations were, even some of the cars.  Many of their kids are now grown and off to school.  Man, where has the time gone.

George Bernard Shaw once said that “youth is wasted on the young.”  I don’t know if that’s true or not but I know that things do, in fact, change!  Usually in direct opposition to your plans!  While I was at the festival I looked around me and suddenly I was back at the Marion County Fair in Indiana.  I can still remember my first Lemon shake-up.  More sugar than anything else, I think the only lemon used in that thing was one cut in half that was ceremoniously waived over the top of the sugar concoction in effort to give the aroma of lemon.  What kind of mother lets an 8 year old boy have that much sugar anyway?  I also remember the first time I had an Italian sausage (pronounced EYE-talian by my mom’s side of the family).  It was the best thing I ever tasted…I never did learn how to keep all that stuff from spilling out, and usually all over the front of my clothes.

When I got to the festival I just knew I had to have a lemon shake-up and an EYE-talian sausage.  Both were good don’t get me wrong, but it was somehow different.  Maybe the spices were dulled down due to people complaining of indigestion, and maybe the sugar-conscious mom’s finally caught up to the lemon shake-up folk and got their arms around the over use of sugar that had raged unchecked for years!  I don’t know.  Or maybe I was the one who had changed.  You know, someone once said you can never go home again, and that’s probably true, but if you can’t then The Conyers Cheery Blossom Festival was a pretty good substitute!  Good weather, Good People, and Good Food…just different.