In March 2011, I retired from the US Postal Service after a 25 year career as a city letter carrier.

Home-roasting coffee. My first two weeks of learning in narrative and pictures.

 

 

What Happened Next The Last Time? What kind of deja vu have you? It was then and now it's new What on Earth was the next move? Was it dull or did it groove? Watch the smoky past unwind Keep up half a step behind That is not the way to think Present tense gets out of sync Don't care what happened yesterday Just go today another way Forget the way it worked before Maybe there's a better door. Free to worry not at all Before I fell, or I stood tall Stay the course or leave the path Either way we still can laugh. Something familiar about this place Been right here in time and space Whatever's next we made it through Now and then I think of you.---Dave Bellware, 2008

Above: Me at Dad's 85th Birthday Party, Sept 2011

Edgar Allan Poem

A full groan pun

Dictionary spoiled my fun

Hominem is not a homonym for homonym 

Just sort of a homophone---Dave Bellware, 2009

People who live in the middle of nowhere are too urban for me. I live in the uncharted outer regions of nowhere, but only about a 20-minute drive to town and, until I retired, work. Jeff Foxworthy says you just might be a redneck if the directions to your house contain the words "turn off the gravel road onto the dirt path". By that standard I'm a redneck although I think that's about my only qualifying redneck attribute.

I've played a lot of tennis and a decent amount of piano and trombone in my life. As a freshman in HS in 1966 I was given the nickname Big Bells by long-time friend Clyde Fitch during a gym class volleyball game in which he managed, as he was occasionally able, to block one of my spikes. "Big Bells isn't big enough" was Clyde's quip. I resented, then tolerated, then embraced the moniker over the next few years.

My sister, despite her skepticism about whether it would do any good, agreed to use the services of an animal communicator to find her lost dog in the summer of 2006. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you will be amazed. Here's the exciting and inspirational story: Not the usual dog lost/dog found story.

I went to college for a year and a half back in 1969-71 at UMass Amherst. I also had applied to Michigan and Duke but didn't get accepted. Julius Erving was on the UMass basketball team at the time. Richard Gere, hearing that I was coming, decided to leave the school right before I got there. I didn't do a very good job of applying myself, and over-indulged in just about everything except my formal education, failing to take advantage of the full academic scholarship that I'd been awarded. After earning 42 of the 120 credits necessary for a degree, I took some time off to find myself. When I do, I'm going back. Actually, I did go back for one course in 1990 or 1991 at a nearby Community College. It was a course on computer applications, the only college course I ever paid for out of my own pocket, the only course that I wasn't asking myself why I was in the class, and the only one where I earned an A. I hadn't up until that time had any exposure to computers and did not want them to pass me by. It was not until 1998 that I got my first computer. How did I ever live without computers and the Internet? I can't remember.

Other famous people from my hometown include David Copperfield (magician) and Robert Hegyes, who you might have known as Epstein in "Welcome Back Kotter". Bobby was a fellow member of the Metuchen High School Class of 1969 and a totally down-to-earth guy who stayed in touch with all his old HS classmates until his death in January 2012. Also, Cecelia Holland (best-selling author of "The Firedrake") and Susan Sarandon, who lived in a neighboring town but who I knew in my youth due to both our families belonging to the same swim club. Metuchen has had the nickname "Brainy Borough" since 1915. Here's why.