Through An 'Old Timer's' Eyes
By Howard 'Mac' McDonald

Have you ever looked up at the sky when it has a lot of fleecy white clouds? There are so many things you can make out of those formations. Sometimes I see a face or profile of someone famous or an animal. Once I thought I saw the face of my old drill sergeant. Boy, that was spooky!

Often one sees a maze of vapor trails from all the jets making their merry way to their destinations. Cameron, Potter and McKean counties lie under one of our nation's busiest airways. It seems that no matter when you look up there is a vapor trail.

But beware -- lying in the grass today, looking up at the clouds, can be hazardous to your health. There are critters in the grass, mainly deer ticks that can cause you a lot of trouble. Lyme disease can haunt you for a long time. Most people who get it don't know they have it until things start happening to them. If one of these pesky bugs digs in, it is best that you get the sawbones to remove it.

Or, once in a while, a bird flying drops a deposit that hits you in the eye. My mother used to say, "Aren't you glad cows don't fly?

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Election Day has come and gone. Some people will tell you that their vote won't make any difference. But one vote can decide who wins.

In 1933, when Hitler ran for Chancellor of Germany, he won by one vote. Look at the impact that had on the world. I wonder what would have been in the history books today if that one vote had not been cast.

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I think that every organization in the U.S.A. has sent me address labels. If I wrote and mailed an envelope for every one of those labels, I would be flat broke, especially with stamps at 41 cents now.

Maybe we should bring back the Pony Express. With gas prices going through the roof, think how much money the Postal Service would save. A letter would not take three days to go to Driftwood.

Does anyone remember the old Railway Express? When the trains were running, mail moved from one town to another without first being sent to a central post office to be sorted, then sent the way that it should have gone in the first place.

If you are sending a package, I think the worst thing you can do is to have "fragile" written on it. Yes, you can insure it, but if they mash your package flat, try and collect the insurance.

Do they have a special compactor that packages marked "fragile" are put through? No human could inflict that much damage on a package. If I sound like I had a bad package experience, then you guessed right.

One thing the Postal Service has improved is stamps. The no-lick stamp is a real improvement.

I believe the old stamps had a glue backing manufactured from the leftovers of a sewage plant. If you breathed on a fly after licking a few stamps, he would fall right out of the air.

When I was a kid, I used to collect stamps. I don't know if anyone does that any more. Whenever a stamp came out that was flawed, the value seemed to triple for the collector.

The government used to honor special people by putting their picture on a stamp. I don't think you have to be so special today to get your mug on a stamp.

The day they put Muhammad Ali's face on a stamp will be the day I quit using the post office.