Having Things In Common Life is strange. Sometimes something unexpected happens when you meet someone. Oh, I am not talking about falling in love or though this does happen sometimes. I am talking about meeting someone who walked a very similar life path as you did. As strange as this is, there have been cases where not only were lost brothers and sisters found which neither knew existed. These people were so much alike, they spawned many coincidences such as having the same pet with the same name or marrying a person who had the same name as their brother or sister. Life can be really weird. A while back I met a man who I will call Jim. He was a bartender. The man was in his 80s and still working without pay for a charitable organization. He volunteered one day a week. One could see he was a person who was very well built for his age and obviously had worked out his entire life. He had a great personality and I found him very interesting. As I got to know him better I found out he had served three years in the U.S. Army and the strange thing was it was in the same type of unit I had served in. One day he started to tell me about his life and how he was brought up poor in a rough neighborhood. This was the same for me and I was near his age, so when we would talk about things younger people would know nothing about, it brought back many memories. It seemed his family upbringing was the same as mine. We would talk about things like playing stoop ball. That was a game where you would take a rubber ball and hit it off the point of a step on a stoop. If you could get it to go over everyone’s head, that was a home run. You could also secure lesser bases depending on whether it was caught and how far the ball went. Another game we talked about was stick ball. This was a dangerous game to play because we played it in the road on a Brooklyn street. We would have to stop many times during the game to let cars go by. If one could hit a rubber ball using a broom stick over a certain manhole cover that was a home run and other places in the street were bases. We both used to go into empty lots to see what we could find. Many streets had these empty lots and usually they were filled with refuse. We never thought about germs in those days and used to dig through this stuff and occasionally find something good. One day I found a brand new pocket watch in its box, which excited me at the time. Of course, I was only about 8 years old. Another thing both of us used to do was collect bottle caps off of soda bottles. In the old days candy stores were everywhere and they all had a big red tub with a cover which said Coke on it. It was filled with ice and water and bottles of soda were kept cold in it. You could buy a soda for 5 cents. There was also a bottle opener on the side and when a bottle was opened the cap would fall into a drawer. We used to go into the candy stores and ask for the caps and the store owners always said okay. We would take our caps and play games with them much as kids did later with baseball cards. I had a big bottle cap collection. Jim and I seemed to remember eating something which was very popular at the time. One of my favorites was the Bungalow Bar which was vanilla ice cream covered with toasted almonds. He had fond memories of that also. I haven’t seen a Bungalow Bar vehicle in many years, so I have to assume they are out of business. They used to not only have ice cream trucks but freezer chests on bicycles they sold ice cream out of. Another ice cream product we talked about was called the dreamsicle, although I have also heard it called a creamsicle. It was a vanilla ice cream pop surrounded in orange ice. All the kids loved it. The one thing Jim at over me was the fact he ate pizza when he was a kid. In my neighborhood there were no pizza parlors, and as a matter of fact I didn’t even know what pizza was until my family moved. When Jim began to tell me stories about the time he was in the army, I realized they were very similar to my own experiences. This part of the story you might think is not unusual, but since we were in similar units, there were very similar things we both knew or had experienced. One of those things was called the dehydrated pork chop story. It seemed the army decided to send what they called dehydrated pork chops to the mess one day. I guess it was a trial run. When they arrived, they looked just like some sort of wood chips. You had to take them, soak them in water to try and reconstitute them, before cooking. They were terrible and angered the troops. In my unit the troops caused quite a stir. They had nailed them to the mess hall door. Amazingly, no one was punished for that, I guess the officers also hated the stuff, and even worse was the fact they had to pay for their meals. Both Jim and I were in a position to meet famous people. He worked in a building in New York City where many lived, and I worked in a place where I met them from time to time. It just amazed me how many things we had in common. We even had the same political philosophy which I won’t get into right now. Jim and I are so much alike it is uncanny.
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