How many times have we all been admonished not to talk to strangers? On countless occasions, I’m sure.

While this advice surely has its practicality, it also limits that human contact which is so integral to living and learning. Should we talk to every random person we happen to encounter on the street? No, of course not. But anyone with even a hint of decent judgement should be able to ascertain the difference.  

There is something to be said for being present at an historic, once-in-a-lifetime event.

Two weeks ago, I had the good fortune to be in attendance at two of them.

A running joke in my family has been to compare my father to the “Edward Scissorhands” of movie fame, our tongue-in-cheek reference to his…how to put this delicately…less than stellar history, shall we say, with the hedge trimmer. 

There were several instances of nearly mangled bushes, the time when he cut all the flowers off the lilac shrub by mistake - and, the all-time classic, the day when the power suddenly cut out in mid-trim, causing my father to frantically gesture that one of us must have knocked the cord out of the outlet, only to find it lying there, severed in half, on the grass.

Talk about a trip down memory lane…

I was recently invited to attend one of Lindenhurst School District’s LEFT for Juniors field trips, “LEFT” standing for “Lindenhurst Environmental Field Trip.” This program, an outgrowth of the original (designed for high school Advanced Placement Biology students), is geared especially to the elementary school’s 4th graders. It was founded in the early 1980’s by one innovator, Mr. Lee Paseltiner, Lindenhurst High School teacher and adviser.