LIFE IN THE COLE BIN

By Burton W. ColeMy favorite book when I was a kid wasn’t “Treasure Island,” “Black Beauty,” “Huckleberry Finn” or any of the other volumes regarded as children’s classics.The pages I pored over the most were in the Sears Christmas Wishbook.

LIFE IN THE COLE BIN

By Burton W. Cole He was my first superhero. There was no need to fear when he was around, especially if your name was Sweet Polly Purebred.“When Sweet Polly’s in trouble, I am not slow, it’s hip, hip, hip, and away I go.”I refer to, of course, that champion of champions, Underdog.

LIFE IN THE COLE BIN

I miss home movies. I don’t mean YouTube, Reels or TikTok.Long before cellphones, camcorders and VCRs (remember those?), some of my richer uncles owned 8mm movie cameras. They’d unleash those things at picnics and weddings and other natural disasters.

LIFE IN THE COLE BIN

Greetings, shoppers.If you’re wondering how big your budget is the current holiday season, the answer is, “Nope, not that much.”The fine folks at WalletHub, a personal finance website, ran the numbers, and you’ve already blown your Christmas budget on Thanksgiving turkey and cranberries.

LIFE IN THE COLE BIN

As the great philosopher David Burge once intoned, “Yes, English can be weird. It can be understood through tough thorough thought, though.”Or, to quote the title of a volume by Theodor “Dr. Seuss” Geisel, “The Tough Coughs As He Ploughs the Dough.

LIFE IN THE COLE BIN

I doubt that a more perfect food has ever been created. I suspect that it might even be what the Bible referred to as manna, that life-sustaining food sent directly from Heaven with the morning dew.I speak, of course, about chocolate chip cookie dough.

LIFE IN THE COLE BIN

It’s probably because I’ve already burrowed my way through my cache of Halloween chocolate, but I’m feeling cranky. Old-man cranky.I glanced at the year snickering on the wall calendar. I’ve earned the right to be old-man cranky.

LIFE IN THE COLE BIN

One of my favorite holidays lands this week — Nov. 1. That’s when Halloween candy goes on sale! We can load up on pumpkin-shaped peanut butter cups, which make a whole lot more sense to me than ANYTHING labeled “pumpkin spice.”I hold nothing against pumpkin pie.

LIFE IN THE COLE BIN

All I wanted was some practical, fulfilling uses for that gooey, squishy stuff you scoop from inside Halloween pumpkins. I put the question to a bunch of otherwise reasonably intelligent adults.That’s when the trouble started.

LIFE IN THE COLE BIN

Dried-up rubber bands and balls of single shoelaces. Nine-volt batteries and decks of cards without any aces. Brown paper from packages with snippets of strings…These are a few of my favorite junk drawer things.(If you sang the above lines, I offer my apologies to you and to Rodgers and Hammerstein.