I just heard another one of my neighbors from my childhood days in New York State died. Jackie was not a member of our little neighborhood clique. She was on the fringe. Fact is I didn’t get along with her, and she didn’t much like me. But the fact that she died, joining a list longer than I wish, is not only sad but also alarming.

Gone from our little group are Brent, two Garys and Bob. Dean, Eddie and Tommy are unaccounted for and could be on the list.

Much has changed since the mid-1950s when I left them and moved out West. Change is inevitable, though sometimes they are unwelcome. You put heavy and often damaging pressure on the Earth’s environment as we have in the 50-plus years since I was a young teenager storming the Alleghenies in bare feet, and things happen.

Do you realize in 1958 when I graduated from high school (pushed out the door, really, by a relieved administration) the population in the United States was 175 million? Now it’s 308 million and growing every second.

The world population in that time has gone from 2.9 billion to 6.8 billion. That means the Earth has seen humans crawling around in spaces where they have never been seen before. And if it keeps climbing (we would have to avoid a major world war for it not to), even Gorst will one day be overcrowded.

Can you imagine a Wal-Mart Super Store in Gorst?

Me, either.

The way things are going, however, don’t bet against it. Look where we have come since I last walked out of the Ferndale High School doors. Automobiles once were made, it seemed, by the same contractor who built Sherman Tanks. They could withstand just about anything, even half-full beer bottles thrown at them without causing more than a scratch.

Try doing that with today’s cars and you have a major overhaul.

As a young buck with more guts than brains I drove a 1950 Dodge with suicide doors that could easily have withstood Lee Harvey Oswald’s bolt-firing rifle (if indeed he had one and had it that tragic day in Dallas) and survived to take me on more of my vast wanderings.

I once backed that sucker going full bore into a telephone pole. The pole wobbled. The Dodge just smiled and drove away.

Why I drove the Dodge into a pole will be left to your imagination. But it was late at night, if that gives you a hint.

Back your car into a pole these days and you will be looking for car pieces for the next month.

I can remember when a loaf of bread cost less than a quarter. And you didn’t have a lot of choices. Bread was white and wonderful. Now you need a bank loan and plenty of coins to flip to decided between all the selections, some of which are still white.

When I was growing up (I really haven’t completed that yet, but let’s pretend I did for the purpose of this story) the difference between the sexes was pronounced. Girls were girls and boys were boys and you didn’t step over the line.

At Ferndale, boys would group together and on the other side of the hallway would be a group of girls. We would eye each other with suspicion, not sure what to make of each other. Some of the more daring of us guys would even pretend to make a pass at a girl. But only if she wasn’t looking. It usually brought laughter from our side of the hall.

Walk down a hallway of a local high school now and you will see a lot of mingling of the two sexes, and some things you don’t want to see, especially if you are a parent of one of them.

I don’t remember ever hearing a swear word at school in my three years of high school. Some of my buddies could swear up a storm in the privacy of the Dodge. Most of it was funny, the way they used them.

Years later I would be reminded of those buddies when I would sit in the visitors dugout with Baltimore manager Earl Weaver and listen to his stories. Every other word out of his mouth was a swear word and as much as I don’t like to swear, Earl was incredibly funny. He should have been a comic. And I would laugh and laugh. I was his straight man, and he never disappointed in making me laugh.

One picture I have of him will remain with me for life. It’s postgame and Earl has a beer in one hand, a cigarette in the other, along with a sandwich with which he just stuffed in his mouth. So beer is dripping down one corner of his mouth and bits of the sandwich are sliding down the other corner. He’s chewing the sandwich and swallowing the beer and taking a puff from his cigarette and all the while he’s cussing up a blue storm.

When I’m sad, which happens sometimes, I think of Earl this way and sometimes I come out of my funk.

Now when you walk in public you can hear every four-letter word you know and some you never heard before. And it’s not discreet, it’s loud and almost always without regard for children who are nearby. It makes me sad to think we have stooped this low that we have total disregard for others. The respect factor has almost disappeared.

And it’s both sexes who are doing this.

My father would be appalled at all this. I never heard my father swear, and he never heard me, either. But that’s the way it is now. Things have changed, population growth has forced us closer together, and we are exposed to more and more things we would not think of being exposed to back in 1958.

Are we better off today then we were when I as a youngster and free to roam my little world in my little town back East?

If you could grade it, would it be better to live in 1958 or 2009?

I’m not sure what the answer would be, even though I have lived in both. What I’m sure of is that the progress society has made in those 51 years is remarkable. But being remarkable doesn’t make it better. Does it?

Are we safer now?

We are living longer. But is that good when the last years of our life are spent surviving on medicines and extraordinary care while not really aware of who we are?

Don’t think so.

There is more money available to those fortunate enough to navigate through the various barriers and reach it. But there is also a large disparity between those who have it, and those who don’t. And we in the middle are getting squeezed more and more each day.

We can reach more people more easily than even at any time in our history through advances in technology. Yet, sometimes I sit alone in the still of the night and wonder whether I might be better off having fewer choices, hearing less of what I hear, seeing less of what I see.

I sometimes think, it would be nice to just go day-wading in the Allegheny and at night lay in bed listening to the crickets outside and inside to the Bailey Brothers and Their Happy Valley Days on the WWVA Jamboree from Wheeling, West Virginia on my old Zenith upright radio.

You can’t go back, however, and it is today what it is. So I deal with it. But I don’t always have to be happy how far we have progressed – if that is the right word – and have the right to tune out of the increasing things I don’t like.

As for my neighborhood buddies who are no longer with us here on our worn out Earth, it was fun what we had in the short time we had it. I missed what we had, what we were, and I miss all of you, even Jackie.

Have a great month.

You are loved.